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.