We approach 1,000,000 hits on this weblog, which says a great deal about our poet well over 200 years since he was born. Perhaps I can say with some confidence that the poetry of John Clare is being read much more widely today than ever before, and not just in university and school by teachers and students, but by many ordinary people who read poetry gladly when it doesn't require a manual alongside it to elucidate it. They enjoy the authentic voice of the English countryside and perhaps say, as Clare once did:
‘Where flowers are, God is, and I am free’.
We recognise in Clare a poet with a deep sympathy for, and a precise knowledge of, natural life. Clare's knowledge of the English countryside is unparalleled among English poets: Wordsworth was an amateur to him. As Robert Graves says, a little wickedly :
“Most of [Clare's ] poems were about Nature because, after all,, he had never been anything but a countryman and described only what he knew. By comparison, Wordsworth had a very cursory knowledge of wild life; he did not get up early enough in the morning”
Clare on the other hand knew everything about early mornings. It is among the most frequent of his scenes, symbolic for him of the infancy of the universe and of man, freshened with dew, full of life and sweetness. He knew the dawn as the woodman, the milk-maid and the foddering boy knew it - with wet grass on his boots:
How beautiful & fresh the pastoral smell
of tedded hay breathes in this early mom
Health in these meadows must in summer dwell
& take her walks among these fields of corn
I cannot see her yet her voice is out
On every breeze that fans my hair about
Although the sun is scarcely out of bed
& leans on ground as half awake from sleep
The boy hath left his mossy-thatched shed
& bawls right lustily to cows and sheep
Oor taken with the woodbines overspread
Climbs up to pluck them from their thorny bower
Half drowned by dropples pattering on his head
From leaves bemoistened by nights secret shower
(The breath of morning)
If he stresses, in other poems like 'Summer Morning', the dew glinting 'every shivering bent and glade', there is always a directness that saves the description from stateness and repetition. The shepherd's shoes are sopping wet, the moth begins to hide from the sun, the snail creeps beneath the weeds, 'the sharp wind shivers in the warm gorse blossoms / & trembles in the dead grass oer the heath'. There is always the shock particularity in Clare's best work. The motion of the sun in the sky is observed by a countryman who is accustomed to take his time from it rather than from a watch:
Barn door fowls have gone to bed
Though the sun is two yards high
Ere it reaches the top lands head
That take days lamp from out the sky
(Autumn)
Clare manages to redeem the conventional image of the sun as the day's lamp and give it life, because the whole context is vital -- we even see the sun's movement against the horizon created by a field, and if we suspect that Clare could have pointed out the field he had in mind, we are probably not far wrong. We grow distanced from sun-time and live by the clock, the symbol of mechanical progress, the over-seeing eye of the factory tower. Clare lives by other standards, his life is measured by the sun.
(Robinson & Rowe)
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Image by my friend Jane Air
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