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Elective English—III

Notes Taylor also published Keats, and although the two poets never met, they exemplified rival
strands in Romantic poetry. Clare said that Keats ‘often described nature as she appeared to his
fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described’. While
the Londoner waxed lyrical on the nightingales in his mind, the Northamptonshire peasant
described the real thing, marvelling that ‘so famed a bird/should have no better dress than
russet brown’. In his poem, ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’, Clare pursues the nightingale’s song into
her nest – ‘an hermit’s mossy cell’ – where five eggs lie, of ‘deadened green or rather olive
brown’.
This querying attention to detail epitomises Clare’s poetry: he is looking into the nest, seeing it
for what it is, and simultaneously seeing it in words. Even in the finished poem, you can glimpse
the notes he made while peering between the branches, and hear him struggling to do justice to
these embryonic nightingales, which will one day fuel Keatsian fantasies, but which are for now
simply brown-green eggs.
It is ironic that Clare’s poetic communion with nature was achieved at the expense of his place
in the community. As a child, some fancied his bookishness ‘symptoms of lunacy’. He would ‘as
leave confessed to be a robber as a rhymer,’ he said. Later, he carried scraps of paper and stubby
pencils into the fields with him, and wrote up his collected observations in bouts of fevered
creativity. These manic periods were followed by melancholy, and when the bottom dropped
out of the poetry market after Byron’s death in 1824, Clare’s swift return to obscurity exacerbated
his tendency towards depression.

His mind was haunted by ‘blue devils’, and Jonathan Bate suggests that he may have threatened
suicide. A change of address (three miles to the neighbouring village) further upset him, and at
his family’s request, Clare was removed to an Essex asylum in 1837.
Bate diagnoses Clare with manic depression, and argues that various factors combined to tip
him over into full-blown psychosis. He wonders whether a fall on the head caused lasting
damage, and suggests that Clare’s celebrity alienated him from his fellow villagers, who were
afraid that he would stick them in his next book. One doctor even blamed Clare’s illness on an
addiction to ‘poetic prosing’. Bate allows all these possibilities, but refuses to provide answers
where there are none. His sensitivity to Clare’s mental landscape equals Clare’s own atonement
to the world around him.
In the asylum, Clare’s symptoms worsened: ‘nature to me seems dead,’ he wrote; ‘and her very
pulse seems frozen to an icicle [sic] in the summer sun’. After four years, he absconded, dispensing
volumes of poetry liberally around Epping Forest. It took him four days to walk the hundred
miles home; without money, he was reduced to eating roadside grass, which he found as tasty as
bread.
Bate’s account of this manic walk is deeply moving. For the great poet of external phenomena
was now living a life of the mind, absorbed in his own delusions. A few miles from home, a
woman leapt down from a cart and tried to persuade him to get in with her. He thought she was
mad. In fact, she was his wife.
Clare was returned to another asylum, where he spent the remaining third of his life, occasionally
composing poetry, more often staring into space, ruminating on what he described as ‘the vast
shipwreck of my life’s esteems’. From that shipwreck, Jonathan Bate has salvaged a life that is,
like Clare’s poetry, both lucid and quizzical, rich in colour but devoid of easy consolations.

8.5 Understanding John Clare

John Clare is usually considered one of the Romantic poets and this is an identification, which he
probably would have welcomed. He was an admirer of Byron and a particular fan of Wordsworth,
whose work he found “so natural and beautiful” even after, he confessed, expecting to dislike it.

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