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Unit 8: Love Lives beyond the Tomb by John Clare

8.4 A Romantic Poet Notes

John Clare is often considered the quintessential nature poet of the Romantic era. He was
acclaimed as a “nature poet” from the time his first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and
Scenery, appeared in 1820. Unlike Robert Burns, whose extended education undercut his claims
for status as a “primitive” or “rustic,” Clare was an uneducated field labourer who produced
direct, sensuous lyrics recording the natural world around his native village of Helpston in
Northamptonshire. He grew up surrounded by, and interacting with, the pastoral plants and
animals that were so characteristic of life in English villages and towns in the early 19th century:
thrushes and thistles, skylarks and sunflowers, badgers and buttercups. His love of, and sensitivity
to, these precise details of his environment is perhaps unrivalled in the English language.
Although influenced by his reading of James Thomson, William Cowper, William Wordsworth,
and George Gordon, Lord Byron, his striking poetic style and manuscript idiosyncrasies reveal
a powerful verbal immediacy that makes him unique among the poets of his era:
While ground larks on a sweeing clump of rushes
Or on the top twigs of the oddling bushes
Chirp their ‘cree creeing’ note that sounds of spring
And sky larks meet the sun wi flittering wing
Soon as the morning opes its brightning eye
Large clouds of sturnels blacken thro the sky
From oizer holts about the rushy fen
And reedshaw borders by the river Nen
(from “March,” The Shepherd’s Calendar)
Clare’s unselfconsciousness came at a price, however. By 1837, he was committed to an asylum
at Epping Forest and later to Northampton Asylum for the remainder of his life. Some of his
most powerful and moving lyrics were written during his periods of “insanity.” Their power,
immediacy, and profound personal and psychological awareness leave the critic with little that
can usefully be said about such lines:
I hid my love in field and town
Till e’en the breeze would knock me down.
The bees seemed singing ballads o’er
The fly’s buzz turned a lion’s roar;
And even silence found a tongue
To haunt me all the summer long:
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love.
(“Song,” 1842-64)
John Clare was a Romantic’s dream come true. While Coleridge and Wordsworth had declared
that modern poetry should speak with the voice of the rural poor, they could only mimic that
voice. They were always one step removed from the world their poetry sought to describe.
Clare, however, seemed to spring directly from the soil he wrote about. Throughout his life,
even after he had found fame as a poet, he laboured in the fields around his Northamptonshire
home. His poetry described the world he knew with precise lyricism, offering a connection with
nature that cut out the middle-class middlemen.

He embodied the rural fantasies of the Romantics, and, in his brief period of celebrity, he
fulfilled their democratic ideals. In the words of his publisher John Taylor, Clare gave voice to
‘the unwritten language of England’. He was a kind of noble savage from the fens, teased and
feted on his rare forays into literary London.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 95