John Clare
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John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864)
"The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet"
Born the son of a farm labourer at Helpston (which, at the time of his birth, was in the Soke of Peterborough, which itself was part of Northamptonshire) near Peterborough. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be one of the most important 19th-century poets.
Life Clare became an agricultural labourer whilst still a child, however he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve. In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood would be the main culprit behind his 5-ft stature and contributed to his poor physical health in later life. Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons out of his scanty earnings and had begun to write poems. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury. Clare eventually befriended the author of Seasons who introduced his poems to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. They issued the Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published.
Fame, in the shape of curious visitors, broke the tenor of his life, and he indulged more freely the convivial habits that he had formed: mainly alcoholism, in which Clare eloquently described as his "taste for ale". Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned; but new wants made his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again on the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home. Clare began to find himself discontent with the fact that his style of poetry was no longer in the current "fashion", but also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. Clare once wrote "I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose." Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours, between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and his poetry sold less well. His friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family in 1832 to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston, thinking that would help him. However, this only made him feel more alienated. His last and best work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favorably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased and his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. A more notable instance of this behaviour was demonstrated in his interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock. In July 1837 he was finally removed to a Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum near Loughton in Epping Forest. In 1841, Clare left the asylum in Essex, to walk home, believing that he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married with children to her. He did not believe her family when they told him she had died three years earlier. He remained free, mostly at home in Helpston, for the five months to follow, but eventually the doctors were called in, between Christmas and New Year in 1841, and Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He remained here for the rest of his life, encouraged and helped to write. Here he wrote poetry, including possibly his most famous poem, I Am. He died 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s churchyard.
Poetic Themes Rural Village Life Birds and Beasts Love The Politics of Ecology Clare grew up during a period of massive changes in both town and countryside. The Industrial Revolution blackened urban areas. Many former agricultural workers, including children, went to work in factories because of the rural poverty caused by the Napoleonic wars, which kept wages down but forced prices up. The Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, the nearby fens drained and the common land enclosed. This destruction of a centuries-old way of life distressed Clare deeply. His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems such as Winter Evening, Haymaking and Wood Pictures in Summer celebrate the beauty of the world and the certainties of rural life, where animals must be fed and crops harvested. Poems such as Little Trotty Wagtail show his sharp observation of wildlife, though The Badger is unsentimental about the place of animals in the countryside. At this time, he often used poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more meditative and use forms similar to the folks songs and ballads of his youth. An example of this is Evening. Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature; his knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling. There is more to Clare than animals and rural prettiness, however. Although it is regularly observed that his poem I Am shows a metaphysical depth on a par with his more illustrious contemporaries many of his preasylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics, while his bird's nest poems illustrate the self-awareness, and obsession with the creative process that captivated the romantics in a truly individual style.
The Lament of Swordy Well Petitioners are full of prayers To fall in pity's way But if her hand the gift forbears They'll sooner swear than pray They're not the worst to want who lurch On plenty with complaints No more then those who go to church Are e'er the better saints I hold no hat to beg a mite Nor pick it up when thrown Nor limping leg I hold in sight But pray to keep my own Where profit gets his clutches in There's little he will leave Gain stooping for a single pin Will stick it on his sleeve For passers-by I never pin No troubles to my breast Nor carry round some names to win More money from the rest I'm Swordy Well a piece of land That's fell upon the town Who worked me till I couldn't stand And crush me now I'm down In parish bounds I well may wail Reduced to every shift Pity may grieve at trouble's tale But cunning shares the gift Harvest with plenty on his brow Leaves losses' taunts with me Yet gain comes yearly with the plough And will not let me be Alas dependence thou'rt a brute Want only understands His feelings wither branch and root That falls in parish hands. The muck that clouts the ploughman's shoe The moss that hides the stone, Now I'm become the parish due, Is more than I can own Though I'm no man yet any wrong Some sort of right may seek
And I am glad if e'en a song Gives me room to speak I've got among such grubbing geer And such a hungry pack If I brought harvests twice a year They'd bring me nothing back When war their tyrant-prices got I trembled with alarms They fell and saved my little spot Or towns had turned to farms Let profit keep a humble place That gentry may be known Let pedigrees their honours trace And toil enjoy its own The silver springs grown naked dykes Scarce own a bunch of rushes When grain got high the tasteless tykes Grubbed up trees, banks, and bushes And me, they turned me inside out For sand and grit and stones And turned my old green hills about And pickt my very bones These things that claim my own as theirs Were born by yesterday But ere I fell to town affairs I were as proud as they I kept my horses, cows, and sheep And built the town below Ere they had cat or dog to keep And then to use me so Parish allowance gaunt and dread Had it the earth to keep Would even pine the bees to dead To save an extra keep Pride's workhouse is a place that yields From poverty its gains And mines a workhouse for the fields A-starving the remains The bees flye round in feeble rings And find no blossom bye Then thrum their almost weary wings Upon the moss and die Rabbits that find my hills turned o'er Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor And nibble on the road If with a clover bottle now Spring dares to lift her head The next day brings the hasty plough And makes me misery's bed The butterflyes may wir and come I cannot keep 'em now Nor can they bear my parish home That withers on my brow No, now not e'en a stone can lie I'm just what e'er they like My hedges like the winter flye And leave me but the dyke My gates are thrown from off the hooks The parish thoroughfare Lord he that's in the parish books Has little wealth to spare I couldn't keep a dust of grit Nor scarce a grain of sand But bags and carts claimed every bit And now they've got the land I used to bring the summer's life To many a butterflye But in oppression's iron strife Dead tussocks bow and sigh I've scarce a nook to call my own For things that creep or flye The beetle hiding 'neath a stone Does well to hurry bye Stock eats my struggles every day As bare as any road He's sure to be in something's way If e'er he stirs abroad I am no man to whine and beg But fond of freedom still I hang no lies on pity's peg To bring a grist to mill On pity's back I needn't jump My looks speak loud alone My only tree they've left a stump And nought remains my own My mossy hills gain's greedy hand And more than greedy mind
Levels into a russet land Nor leaves a bent behind In summers gone I bloomed inpride Folks came for miles to prize My flowers that bloomed nowhere beside And scarce believed their eyes Yet worried with a greedy pack They rend and delve and tear The very grass from off my back I've scarce a rag to wear Gain takes my freedom all away Since its dull suit I wore And yet scorn vows I never pay And hurts me more and more And should the price of grain get high Lord help and keep it low I shan't possess a single flye Or get a weed to grow I shan't possess a yad of ground To bid a mouse to thrive For gain has put me in a pound I scarce can keep alive I own I'm poor like many more But the the poor num live And many came for miles before For what I had to give But since I fell upon the town They pass me with a sigh I've scarce the room to say 'Sit down' And so they wander bye Though now I seem so full of clack Yet when ye're riding bye The very birds upon my back Are not more fain to flye I feel so lorn in this disgrace God send the grain to fall I am the oldest in the place And the worst-served of all Lord bless ye I was kind to all And poverty in me Could always find a humble stall A rest and lodging free Poor bodys with an hungry ass I welcomed many a day
And gave him tether-room and grass And never said him nay There was a time my bit of ground Made freemen of the slave The ass no pindar'd dare to pound When I his supper gave The gipsey's camp was not affraid I made his dwelling free Till vile enclosure came and made A parish slave of me The gipseys further on sojourn No parish bounds they like No sticks I own and would earth burn I shouldn't own a dyke I am no friend to lawless work Nor would a rebel be And why I call a Christian turk Is they are turks to me And if I could but find a friend With no deceit to sham Who'd send me some few sheep to tend And leave me as I am To keep my hills from cart and plough And strife of mongrel men And as a spring found me find me now I should look up agen And save his Lordship's woods, that past The day of danger dwell Of all the fields I am the last That my own face can tell Yet what with stone pits' delving holes And strife to buy and sell My name will quickly be the whole That's left of Swordy Well.
"The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet"
Born the son of a farm labourer at Helpston (which, at the time of his birth, was in the Soke of Peterborough, which itself was part of Northamptonshire) near Peterborough. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be one of the most important 19th-century poets.
Life Clare became an agricultural labourer whilst still a child, however he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve. In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood would be the main culprit behind his 5-ft stature and contributed to his poor physical health in later life. Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons out of his scanty earnings and had begun to write poems. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury. Clare eventually befriended the author of Seasons who introduced his poems to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. They issued the Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published.
Fame, in the shape of curious visitors, broke the tenor of his life, and he indulged more freely the convivial habits that he had formed: mainly alcoholism, in which Clare eloquently described as his "taste for ale". Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned; but new wants made his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again on the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home. Clare began to find himself discontent with the fact that his style of poetry was no longer in the current "fashion", but also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. Clare once wrote "I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose." Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours, between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and his poetry sold less well. His friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family in 1832 to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston, thinking that would help him. However, this only made him feel more alienated. His last and best work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favorably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased and his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. A more notable instance of this behaviour was demonstrated in his interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock. In July 1837 he was finally removed to a Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum near Loughton in Epping Forest. In 1841, Clare left the asylum in Essex, to walk home, believing that he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married with children to her. He did not believe her family when they told him she had died three years earlier. He remained free, mostly at home in Helpston, for the five months to follow, but eventually the doctors were called in, between Christmas and New Year in 1841, and Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He remained here for the rest of his life, encouraged and helped to write. Here he wrote poetry, including possibly his most famous poem, I Am. He died 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s churchyard.
Poetic Themes Rural Village Life Birds and Beasts Love The Politics of Ecology Clare grew up during a period of massive changes in both town and countryside. The Industrial Revolution blackened urban areas. Many former agricultural workers, including children, went to work in factories because of the rural poverty caused by the Napoleonic wars, which kept wages down but forced prices up. The Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, the nearby fens drained and the common land enclosed. This destruction of a centuries-old way of life distressed Clare deeply. His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems such as Winter Evening, Haymaking and Wood Pictures in Summer celebrate the beauty of the world and the certainties of rural life, where animals must be fed and crops harvested. Poems such as Little Trotty Wagtail show his sharp observation of wildlife, though The Badger is unsentimental about the place of animals in the countryside. At this time, he often used poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more meditative and use forms similar to the folks songs and ballads of his youth. An example of this is Evening. Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature; his knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling. There is more to Clare than animals and rural prettiness, however. Although it is regularly observed that his poem I Am shows a metaphysical depth on a par with his more illustrious contemporaries many of his preasylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics, while his bird's nest poems illustrate the self-awareness, and obsession with the creative process that captivated the romantics in a truly individual style.
The Lament of Swordy Well Petitioners are full of prayers To fall in pity's way But if her hand the gift forbears They'll sooner swear than pray They're not the worst to want who lurch On plenty with complaints No more then those who go to church Are e'er the better saints I hold no hat to beg a mite Nor pick it up when thrown Nor limping leg I hold in sight But pray to keep my own Where profit gets his clutches in There's little he will leave Gain stooping for a single pin Will stick it on his sleeve For passers-by I never pin No troubles to my breast Nor carry round some names to win More money from the rest I'm Swordy Well a piece of land That's fell upon the town Who worked me till I couldn't stand And crush me now I'm down In parish bounds I well may wail Reduced to every shift Pity may grieve at trouble's tale But cunning shares the gift Harvest with plenty on his brow Leaves losses' taunts with me Yet gain comes yearly with the plough And will not let me be Alas dependence thou'rt a brute Want only understands His feelings wither branch and root That falls in parish hands. The muck that clouts the ploughman's shoe The moss that hides the stone, Now I'm become the parish due, Is more than I can own Though I'm no man yet any wrong Some sort of right may seek
And I am glad if e'en a song Gives me room to speak I've got among such grubbing geer And such a hungry pack If I brought harvests twice a year They'd bring me nothing back When war their tyrant-prices got I trembled with alarms They fell and saved my little spot Or towns had turned to farms Let profit keep a humble place That gentry may be known Let pedigrees their honours trace And toil enjoy its own The silver springs grown naked dykes Scarce own a bunch of rushes When grain got high the tasteless tykes Grubbed up trees, banks, and bushes And me, they turned me inside out For sand and grit and stones And turned my old green hills about And pickt my very bones These things that claim my own as theirs Were born by yesterday But ere I fell to town affairs I were as proud as they I kept my horses, cows, and sheep And built the town below Ere they had cat or dog to keep And then to use me so Parish allowance gaunt and dread Had it the earth to keep Would even pine the bees to dead To save an extra keep Pride's workhouse is a place that yields From poverty its gains And mines a workhouse for the fields A-starving the remains The bees flye round in feeble rings And find no blossom bye Then thrum their almost weary wings Upon the moss and die Rabbits that find my hills turned o'er Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor And nibble on the road If with a clover bottle now Spring dares to lift her head The next day brings the hasty plough And makes me misery's bed The butterflyes may wir and come I cannot keep 'em now Nor can they bear my parish home That withers on my brow No, now not e'en a stone can lie I'm just what e'er they like My hedges like the winter flye And leave me but the dyke My gates are thrown from off the hooks The parish thoroughfare Lord he that's in the parish books Has little wealth to spare I couldn't keep a dust of grit Nor scarce a grain of sand But bags and carts claimed every bit And now they've got the land I used to bring the summer's life To many a butterflye But in oppression's iron strife Dead tussocks bow and sigh I've scarce a nook to call my own For things that creep or flye The beetle hiding 'neath a stone Does well to hurry bye Stock eats my struggles every day As bare as any road He's sure to be in something's way If e'er he stirs abroad I am no man to whine and beg But fond of freedom still I hang no lies on pity's peg To bring a grist to mill On pity's back I needn't jump My looks speak loud alone My only tree they've left a stump And nought remains my own My mossy hills gain's greedy hand And more than greedy mind
Levels into a russet land Nor leaves a bent behind In summers gone I bloomed inpride Folks came for miles to prize My flowers that bloomed nowhere beside And scarce believed their eyes Yet worried with a greedy pack They rend and delve and tear The very grass from off my back I've scarce a rag to wear Gain takes my freedom all away Since its dull suit I wore And yet scorn vows I never pay And hurts me more and more And should the price of grain get high Lord help and keep it low I shan't possess a single flye Or get a weed to grow I shan't possess a yad of ground To bid a mouse to thrive For gain has put me in a pound I scarce can keep alive I own I'm poor like many more But the the poor num live And many came for miles before For what I had to give But since I fell upon the town They pass me with a sigh I've scarce the room to say 'Sit down' And so they wander bye Though now I seem so full of clack Yet when ye're riding bye The very birds upon my back Are not more fain to flye I feel so lorn in this disgrace God send the grain to fall I am the oldest in the place And the worst-served of all Lord bless ye I was kind to all And poverty in me Could always find a humble stall A rest and lodging free Poor bodys with an hungry ass I welcomed many a day
And gave him tether-room and grass And never said him nay There was a time my bit of ground Made freemen of the slave The ass no pindar'd dare to pound When I his supper gave The gipsey's camp was not affraid I made his dwelling free Till vile enclosure came and made A parish slave of me The gipseys further on sojourn No parish bounds they like No sticks I own and would earth burn I shouldn't own a dyke I am no friend to lawless work Nor would a rebel be And why I call a Christian turk Is they are turks to me And if I could but find a friend With no deceit to sham Who'd send me some few sheep to tend And leave me as I am To keep my hills from cart and plough And strife of mongrel men And as a spring found me find me now I should look up agen And save his Lordship's woods, that past The day of danger dwell Of all the fields I am the last That my own face can tell Yet what with stone pits' delving holes And strife to buy and sell My name will quickly be the whole That's left of Swordy Well.
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