A real original, and just as much so now as 200 years ago. He raises all sorts of issues to do with metre and diction and voice, and what is poetry FOR. He wrote in the fields. His pockets were full of scraps. He LIVED for poetry and his poetry all came right out of him; he wasn't listening to anyone else's idea of what it was.

But as his handwriting was execrable and he never used punctuation it's all fraught with editorial difficulties and I can't vouch for these poems I'm posting, alas. For example, I'm willing to bet Clare wrote "Clock a Clay."

The beautiful thing is that he and Keats were very aware of each other, sharing a publisher, and followed each other's new work. They never met; Keats was too ill on the one occasion when they might have. A few months later when he died Clare wrote a sad sad sonnet.

I really love him.

Clock-O'-Clay

In the cowslip pips I lie,
Hidden from the buzzing fly,
While green grass beneath me lies,
Pearled with dew like fishes' eyes,
Here I lie, a clock-o'-clay,
Waiting for the time o' day.

While the forest quakes surprise,
And the wild wind sobs and sighs,
My home rocks as like to fall
On its pillar green and tall.
When the pattering rain drives by
Clock-o'-clay keeps warm and dry.

Day by day and night by night,
All the week I hide from sight.
In the cowslip pips I lie
In the rain still warm and dry.
Day and night and night and day,
Red, black-spotted clock-o'-clay.

My home shakes in wind and showers,
Pale green pillar topped with flowers
Bending at the wild wind's breath,
Till I touch the grass beneath.
Here I live, lone clock-o'-clay,
Watching for the time of day.


I Am! Yet What I Am None Cares or Knows
Written in Northampton County Asylum

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 shades in love and death's oblivion lost,
And yet I am, and live with shadows tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems,
And e'en the dearest -that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has 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.


Emmonsail's Heath in Winter


I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing,
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ashtree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gipsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread,
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.


I'm too pressed for time to look up The Badger but if anyone has it typed in, do post it!

KEB

[This message has been edited by Katy Evans-Bush (edited February 27, 2005).]

Thank you, thank you.
I love Clare's poetry and think he is one of the very great poets and one unjustly neglected

Here is THE BADGER

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole, and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes an hears - they let the strongest loose.
The old fox gears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.


He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray'
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold,
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels


The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, and awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.





[This message has been edited by John Campion Reynolds (edited February 27, 2005).]

The Badger

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes and hears - they let the strongest loose.
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forkéd stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.
He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled wher'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray;
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels.
The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans and dies.

John Clare

Thanks very much for this thread. I love Clare too. I had never read him much until about a year ago when (in the hospital with my wife, awaiting the birth of our son) I read aloud a New Yorker piece on him that I found very good. One detail I remember is that that writer said Clare was easily the poorest (economically, not aesthetically) of all the canonical English writers and then went into detail about his struggles to supply himself with ink and paper (sometimes bark) to write on. This poverty, combined with his excellence and his struggles with mental illness, adds a level of interest to the beautifully-observed poems for me.

[This message has been edited by Simon Hunt (edited February 27, 2005).]

Simon, you want to get the wonderful and authoritative biography of Clare by Jonathan Bate. It came out last year and is probably why Clare was being written up in the New Yorker. It's big and fat, so of course I never finished it, but I read about half of it and was gripped and enthralled.

Bate, interestingly, had a lot to say about Clare's supposed poverty. Poverty being relative, of course. He argues that the Clares were no poorer than anyone else, and that their snug little house was hardly a hovel by village standards, whatever the London swanks may have thought. He also argues that Clare had the money to self-publish, that his mother though uneducated was not "illiterate" in the way we now apply the word, that he read feverishly and was - albeit self-educated - better-read than some men with "proper" educations, and that he wrote every bit as deliberately, painstakingly and with as much attention to craft as any aristocratic court poet.

But of course the publishers - John Taylor, famous for publishing Keats (& Byron??) as well - marketed Clare pretty aggressively as a poor yokel, almost in a "look, he can write poetry!" kind of way. Ultimately of course, this led to his failure because no one wanteed him to develop as a poet, they only wanted him to be a party trick. So much of his mature work was never published till after 1900 and some not till shockingly recently. Like, the last ten years.

One of the reasons I find him so fresh and important is the way he manipulated language - HIS languiage - to a form that felt right on his tongue, that wasn't "poetic" in the frock-coat, classical-allusion way we think of, but that was rooted in the language and the world. He ADDED something to the way poetry can be used in English.

Of course, he doesn't go in for the sophistries of wordplay and metaphor so much, he's not a metaphysical, he's not big on wit and so on, but his poetry is certainly readable on more than one level. And it feels so meaty and wonderful on the tongue (& in the brain).

Also, because of the enclosing of the pastureland and other things that were going on at the time, even a simple poem like a descri[ption of walking through a given meadow in spring is actually a very political poem. He does talk about the enclosures in some poems, very angrily. And I think even that can compare to poetry, as in "who owns the earth" and"who owns the language" when people thought it was so remarkable that he could even write, as if somehow he shouldn't.

Well, there's my Clare essay! Hope someone finds it interesting. Too bad I'm not doing an exam or something on it!

KEB

I love John Clare too. Thanks for starting this thread, Katy. I feel we must have had a Clare thread sometime in the past, but am sure it is high time we had another one.

I'll come back with some more poems/thoughts, but wanted to share this lovely Wendy Cope poem to him, from <u>If I Don't Know</u>. Actually, she's right next to Clare on my bookshelf, I just realized.

John Clare

John Clare, I cried last night
For you--your grass-green coat,
Your oddness, others' spite,
Your fame, enjoyed and lost,
Your gift, and what it cost.

Awake in the early hours,
I heard you with my eyes,
Carolling woods and showers.
AS if a songbird's throat
Could utter words, you wrote.

I listened late and long--
Each clear, true, loving note
Placed justly in its song.
Sometimes for sheer delight,
John Clare, I cried last night.

John Clare IS poetry. he seems to be what poetry is for. I posted a link about a year ago to an article about Clare.

(Edited back in. Simon, the New Yorker article was the one I linked. I looked for it now but haven't managed to find it. It was much better than any of these.)

Thank you everyone who has posted his work here.
Janet

I just found this link:
John Clare

and this

Slate article


and this

New Yorker article


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 28, 2005).]

Heard in a Violent Ward
Theodore Roethke

In heaven, too,
You'd be institutionalized.
But that's all right, -
If they let you eat and swear
With the likes of Blake,
And Christopher Smart,
And that sweet man, John Clare.

First Love

by John Clare


I ne'er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet.
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale, a deadly pale.
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked what could I ail
My life and all seemed turned to clay.

And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away.
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start.
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.

Are flowers the winter's choice
Is love's bed always snow
She seemed to hear my silent voice
Not love appeals to know.
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling place
And can return no more.

This is one of my favorites. There is many a bird poem in English, and many a skylark poem, but few that are so "grounded" in the real world as this. (No blithe spirits here.) Birds tend in our poetry to be symbols of poetry itself--and while one of the things I love about John Clare is how UNsymbolic things are--it's hard not to read this and think of Clare's poetry--a high soaring song with its nest built safely and unobtrusively on the humble earth:

The Skylark

The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize--
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed - not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen - Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

It's rather long but I think it's worth posting here this very fine poem by Anthony Hecht:

COMING HOME
From the journals of John Clare


July 18, 1841

They take away our belts so that we must hold
Our trousers up. The truly mad don't bother
And thus are oddly hobbled. Also our laces
So that our shoes do flop about our feet.
But I'm permitted exercise abroad
And feeling rather down and melancholy
Went for a forest walk. There I met gypsies
And sought their help to make good my escape
From the mad house. I confessed I had no money
But promised I should furnish them fifty pounds.
We fixed on Saturday. But when I returned
They had disappeared in their Egyptian way.
The sun set up its starlight in the trees
Which the breeze made to twinkle. They left behind
An old wide awake hat on which I battened
As it might advantage me some later time.


July 20

Calmly, as though I purposed to converse
With the birds, as I am sometimes known to do,
I walked down the lane gently and was soon
In Enfield Town and then on the great York Road
Where it was all plain sailing, where no enemy
Displayed himself and I was without fear.
I made good progress, and by the dark of night
Skirted a marsh or pond and found a hovel
Floored with thick bales of clover and laid me down
As on the harvest of a summer field,
Companion to imaginary bees.
But I was troubled by uneasy dreams.
I thought my first wife lay in my left arm
And then somebody took her from my side
Which made me wake to hear someone say, “Mary,”
But nobody was by. I was alone.

***

I've made some progress, but being without food,
It is slower now, and I must void my shoes
Of pebbles fairly often, and rest myself.
I lay in a ditch to be out of the wind's way,
Fell into sleep for half an hour or so
And waked to find the left side of me soaked
With a foul scum and a soft mantling green.

***


I travel much at night, and I remember
Walking some miles under a brilliant sky
Almost dove-grey from closely hidden moonlight
Cast on the moisture of the atmosphere
Against which the tall trees on either side
Were unimaginably black and flat
And the puddles of the road flagstones of silver.

***

On the third day, stupid with weariness
And hunger, I assuaged my appetite
With eating grass, which seemed to taste like bread,
And seemed to do me good; and once, indeed,
It satisfied a king of Babylon.
I remember passing through the town of Buckden
And must have passed others as in a trance
For I recall none till I came to Stilton
Where my poor feet gave out. I found a tussock
Where I might rest myself, and as I lay down
I heard the voice of a young woman say,
“Poor creature,” and another, older voice,
“He shams,” but when I rose the latter said,
“0 no he don't,” as I limped quickly off.
I never saw those women, never looked back.


July 23

I was overtaken by a man and woman
Traveling by cart, and found them to be neighbors
From Helpstone where I used to live. They saw
My ragged state and gave me alms of fivepence
By which at the public house beside the bridge
I got some bread and cheese and two half-pints
And so was much refreshed, though scarcely able
To walk, my feet being now exceeding crippled
And I required to halt more frequently,
But greatly cheered at being in home's way.
I recognized the road to Peterborough
And all my hopes were up when there came towards me
A cart with a man, a woman and a boy.
When they were close, the woman leaped to the ground,
Seized both my hands and urged me towards the cart
But I refused and thought her either drunk
Or mad, but when I was told that she was Patty,
My second wife, I suffered myself to climb
Aboard and soon arrived at Northborough.
But Mary was not there. Neither could I discover
Anything of her more than the old story
That she was six years dead, intelligence
Of a doubtful newspaper some twelve years old;
But I would not be taken in by blarney
Having seen her very self with my two eyes
About twelve months ago, alive and young
And fresh and well and beautiful as ever.

Gregory,
That poem exemplifies nearly all the reasons I have for absolutely loving the poetry and mind of Anthony Hecht. His humanity and ability to enter into the centre of experiences and to become other people.

I saw a documentary the other day in which Arthur Miller described a man who had lost all hope and fortune in the Wall Street collapse. He had one phrase for everything: "Well say!" He could say it an infinite number of ways. As Arthur Miller told that story he became that man. Hecht shares this empathetic imagination. Oh, and he could write too.
Janet

Oh, I'm SO glad I started this thread! I'll have to read the Hecht later, on paper. It looks amazing. It looks like "I wish I'd written that."

I did a similar thing with a friend of mine, I made poems out of his emails and it was very successfu. I got a couple of good things that way. But the material has to be good, and in Hecht's cse being a genius didn't hurt.

It's funny when you find out what you thought was a private thing is shared by everybody...

KEB

Dear Katy

An interesting exercise is to read Clare’s journal in which he describes his journey out of Essex during those days and see in detail what Hecht made of Clare’s own words.

In this case Hecht acknowledges his source. When he does this kind of thing elsewhere, sometimes the source is concealed. In his last book, for instance, the first poem, “Late Afternoon: The Onslaught of Love”, is derived from the opening paragraphs of the third section of Chapter 3 of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. (I owe this insight to my friend, the poet Joe Harrison. – The original text can be found at this site: http://abu.cnam.fr/cgi-bin/go?bovary3,3937 .)

Hecht, who in my view was a great poet, was often a considerably more complex and oblique than some of his admirers perhaps give him credit for.

Regards to all

Clive Watkins

Clive,
I would never underestimate the obliqueness nor complexity of Hecht.
I agree that he was a very great poet.
Janet

Oh my God. The movers have been. My Hecht and my Clare are BOTH (along with everything else except the Changing Light at Sandover) in crates in a warehouse.

Panic!!!!

KEB

Oh, the obliquity. Hecht scares me; he is amazing. I enjoyed his journey from Essex poem very much, but I think the voice of Clare isn't Hecht's natural tone. There were interesting overlaps where they sounded like a Dalek, kind of - you know, the two-toned voice speaking in unison with itself - but Hecht is SO much more sophisticated an animal.

There, that's calmed me down...

I received an interesting telphone call from Prof. Eric Robinson this morning. He was one of two editors of the Oxford Press edition of Clare's works and is considered the leading scholar on Clare. He also holds a copyright on all of Clare's poems not published in the poet's lifetime, which he purchased from the successor to Clare's publisher who bought it from Clare while he was yet alive and in his right mind, more or less.

I thought Prof. Robinson might be calling about some of the poems posted on this thread, but he says he has given up the copyright business, which has been violated several times, though he has prevented one or two books of "modernized" Clare from being published.

However, Prof. Robinson was calling about a recently discovered manuscript by, and in the handwriting of, Robert Bloomfield, a poor cobbler and "peasant poet" of Clare's day (known and admired by Clare) whose poems were at that time even more popular than Clare's. One of Bloomfield's books sold over 26,000 copies within three years. He, like Clare wrote in the East England dialect and had trouble with his editors who sometimes rewrote him in the high romantic style of late 18th century society verse.

This new-found Bloomfield manuscript (how long it is, I do not know) was unearthed by a Mr. Tom Cochran, an Englishman. Prof. Robinson says Mr. Cochran is interested in publicizing the poems on the Internet. He (Robinson) thought I might want to run it in the Susquehanna Quarterly, but as I don't have the SQ anymore and there seems scant prospect of anyone carrying it on, I told him I would ask around for suggestions and then telephone Mr. Cochran with whatever help I can provide.

Any ideas? Alex? Tim? Clive? Sam? Anyone?

Here is one Bloomfield poem,with his introduction, perhaps as edited by his upper-class publisher. For a couple of others, see http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/bloomfield/
__________________________________________________ _______

TO A SPINDLE (c. 1805)

The portrait of my mother was taken on her last visit to London, in the summer of 1804, and about six months previous to her dissolution. During the period of evident decline in her strength and faculties, she conceived, in place of that patient resignation which she had before felt, an ungovernable dread of ultimate want; and observed to a relative, with peculiar emphasis, that ‘to meet Winter, Old Age, and Poverty, was like meeting three giants.’

To the last hour of her life she was an excellent spinner; and latterly, the peculiar kind of wool she spun, was brought exclusively for her, as being the only one in the village, who exercised their industry on so fine a sort. During the tearful paroxysms of her last depression, she spun with the utmost violence, and with vehemence exclaimed, ‘I must spin!’ A paralytic affection, struck her whole right side, while at work, and obliged her to quit her spindle when only half filled, and she died within a fortnight afterwards. I have that spindle now.

She was buried on the last day of the year 1804. She returned from her visit to London, on Friday, the 29th of June, just to a day, 23 years after she brought me to London, which was also on a Friday, in the year 1781.



Relic! I will not bow to thee, nor worship!
Yet, treasure as thou art, remembrancer
Of sunny days, that ever haunt my dreams,
Where thy brown fellows as a task I twirl’d,
And sang my ditties, ere the farm received
My vagrant foot, and with its liberty,
And all its cheerful buds, and op’ning flowers,
Had taught my heart to wander:
- Relic of affection! come; -
Thou shalt a moral teach to me and mine;
The hand that wore thee smooth is cold, and spins
No more! Debility press’d hard, around
The seat of life, and terrors fill’d her brain, -
Nor causeless terrors. Giants grim and bold,
Three mighty ones she fear’d to meet: - they came -
Winter, Old Age, and Poverty, - all came;
The last had dropp’d his club, yet fancy made
Him formidable; and when Death beheld
Her tribulation, he fulfill’d his task,
And to her trembling hand and heart at once,
Cried, ‘Spin no more.’ - Thou then wert left half fill’d
With this soft downy fleece, such as she wound
Through all her days, she who could spin so well.
Half fill’d wert thou - half finish’d when she died!
- Half finish’d? ’Tis the motto of the world:
We spin vain threads, and strive, and die
With sillier things than spindles on our hands!
Then feeling, as I do, resistlessly,
The bias set upon my soul for verse;
Oh, should old age still find my brain at work,
And Death, o’er some poor fragment striding, cry
‘Hold! spin no more!’ grant, Heaven, that purity
Of thought and texture, may assimilate
That fragment unto thee, in usefulness,
In worth, and snowy innocence. Then shall
The village school-mistress, shine brighter through
The exit of her boy; and both shall live,
And virtue triumph too; and virtue’s tears,
Like Heaven’s pure blessings, fall upon their grave.

G.




[This message has been edited by Golias (edited April 01, 2005).]

G.,

This is simply dynamite. Had presses money, the bidding would have commenced already. Thanks for sharing this.

John

For better understanding of the last lines of the Bloomfield poem above, I should note that the poet's mother had been a village schoolmistress, his father a poor taylor.

G.

Wiley (since you mentioned SQ ;),
I have never heard of Bloomfield before.
This is moving in its simple honesty as well as its fluency. There is something familiar in the voice that reminds me of early settlers' journals in New Zealand. The industry and sense of mortality and unbeatable odds imbue many such texts. Thank you so much for posting this.
The other link would not open for me alas.
Best,
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited April 01, 2005).]