By IHE Graduate Fellow Ian Tuttle
“Winter kept us warm,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “covering / Earth with forgetful snow.” Spring, then, is a time for relearning the world. Was there ever a better student than John Clare?
Born in tiny Helpston, Northamptonshire, England, in 1793 to illiterate parents; barely schooled; farm laborer by the age of 12, lime-burner and tavern potboy, Clare became “The Peasant Poet,” as he styled himself in a work by that name. He made his reputation with just four volumes, published in a brief span: the debut Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), received rapturously; then The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (1821), The Shepherd’s Calendar with Village Stories (1827), and The Rural Muse (1835), all less successful. Victim of grinding poverty, depression, and alcoholism, Clare spent the last quarter-century of his life in an asylum, wavering between delusions and lucidity. Neglected for nearly a century after his death in 1864, he is now considered one of the great English Romantics.
If Wordsworth is a poet of speculation (the famous Prelude recounts “the growth of a poet’s mind”), Clare is a poet of observation, an indefatigable noticer. The fields of Helpston, the fens of Northborough, the woods of Epping Forest are his demesne, and his poems are lyrical records. There are poems of animals (“The Fox,” “The Badger,” “The Hedgehog”), of insects (“The Droning Bee”), of plants and flowers (“To a Rose Bud in Humble Life”), and, most important, of birds — 147 different species, according to the anthology, The Poetry of Birds (2011).
Keats had his nightingale, of course, and Shelley his skylark; but Clare tends to refrain from freighting his subjects with symbolism. He simply watches and listens. “The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,” while the rambling bees “sing their wood journey.” Scholar Sarah Houghton-Walker argues: “Clare’s greatest achievement is the conjunction of scientific accuracy with what he calls ‘poetic feeling’. He possesses a depth of knowledge only achievable by painstaking observation[.]” Painter Carry Akroyd, who has incorporated Clare’s poetry into her visual art, says Clare wrote with “eyes wide open to everything. . . . and even now makes us see more.”
Winter has come and gone. The blossoms are on the trees, the bees are rambling in the lane, and the poet sings: “There’s a gladness of heart in the first days of Spring.” After the forgetfulness of winter, we awaken to the Easter morning of creation made new.
