Not everyone is an expert in Romantic poetry (and neither am I, though I concede I’m no slouch) but if I were to ask you to name “the big six” poets of the Romantic era (late 18th to mid-19th century), I bet you’d stand a fighting chance because they almost fall off the tongue: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Shelley, and Keats, right? There’s another poet from the era, however, who never rose to the majesty of the aforementioned giants, but who nonetheless is now regarded as a major talent: the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”, John Clare.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, John Clare didn’t have the wherewithal to lounge about on the Spanish Steps in Rome (Keats), swim the Hellespont (Byron), or swap ghost stories around the fire at a villa by Lake Geneva (Shelley…oh, and Byron again), because he spent his life as an agricultural labourer, potboy, and gardener, and never left the country.
Born in Helpston in Northamptonshire in 1793, John worked as a farm labourer with his father from being a young boy onwards. The farm and the nature permeating his surroundings provided his inspirations; this was where he found his voice and began writing poems and sonnets. In an attempt to stave off his parents’ eviction from their home, John offered his poems to a local bookseller, who in turn sent them off to the publishing firm who had already published the works of one John Keats. The rural aesthetic appealed and thus, these successful collections of poems were spawned: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, The Village Minstrel and Other Poems, The Rural Muse, and the collection I own: The Shepherd’s Calendar.
Whilst Clare’s earlier poems speak of the harmony and beauty of nature in the English countryside, his later work bemoans the great changes to the environment and society brought about by the Enclosure Acts. These wiped out a whole way of life by abolishing the open field system of agriculture which had been the way people farmed in England for centuries. The ownership of the common land was taken from them and the countryside was decimated as newly-unemployed country folk flowed into the towns to participate in the Industrial Revolution.
The hurt was deep, and in fact Clare found it increasingly difficult to cope with life, and he sadly descended into depression and mental illness, eventually spending many years in an asylum. Whilst there he wrote the poem I Am! which is a window into his mental struggles and a stark contrast to his hard-working but happy heyday. Here’s a poem from the latter period, Spring, with I Am! following…
Spring
Come, gentle Spring, and show thy varied greens
In woods, and fields, and meadows, by clear brooks;
Come, gentle Spring, and bring thy sweetest scenes,
Where peace, with solitude, the loveliest looks;
Where the blue unclouded sky
Spreads the sweetest canopy,
And Study wiser grows without her books.
Come hither, gentle May, and with thee bring
Flowers of all colours, and the wild briar rose;
Come in wind-floating drapery, and bring
Fragrance and bloom, that Nature’s love bestows–
Meadow pinks and columbines,
Kecksies white and eglantines,
And music of the bee that seeks the rose.
Come, gentle Spring, and bring thy choicest looks,
Thy bosom graced with flowers, thy face with smiles;
Come, gentle Spring, and trace thy wandering brooks,
Through meadow gates, o’er footpath crooked stiles;
Come in thy proud and best array,
April dews and flowers of May,
And singing birds that come where heaven smiles.
I Am!
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
