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).]
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