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Unit 8: Love Lives beyond the Tomb by John Clare

He died on 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in Notes
St Botolph’s churchyard. Today, children at the John Clare School, Helpston’s primary, parade
through the village and place their ‘midsummer cushions’ around Clare’s gravestone (which
has the inscriptions “To the Memory of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” and
“A Poet is Born not Made”) on his birthday, in honour of their most famous resident.

8.2 Poetry

In his time, Clare was commonly known as “the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”. His formal
education was brief, his other employment and class-origins were lowly. Clare resisted the use
of the increasingly standardised English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose,
alluding to political reasoning in comparing ‘grammar’ (in a wider sense of orthography) to
tyrannical government and slavery, personifying it in jocular fashion as a ‘bitch’. He wrote in
his Northamptonshire dialect, introducing local words to the literary canon such as ‘pooty’
(snail), ‘lady-cow’ (ladybird), ‘crizzle’ (to crisp) and ‘throstle’ (song thrush).
In his early life, he struggled to find a place for his poetry in the changing literary fashions of the
day. He also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. Clare once wrote,
“I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of
having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention
them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my
silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no
purpose.”
It is common to see an absence of punctuation in many of Clare’s original writings, although
many publishers felt the need to remedy this practice in the majority of his work. Clare argued
with his editors about how it should be presented to the public.
Clare grew up during a period of massive changes in both town and countryside as the Industrial
Revolution swept Europe. Many former agricultural workers, including children, moved away
from the countryside to over-crowded cities, following factory work. The Agricultural Revolution
saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, the fens drained and the common land
enclosed. This destruction of a centuries-old way of life distressed Clare deeply. His political
and social views were predominantly conservative (“I am as far as my politics reaches ‘King and
Country’—no Innovations in Religion and Government say I.”). He refused even to complain
about the subordinate position to which English society relegated him, swearing, “With the old
dish that was served to my forefathers I am content.”

John Clare early work delights in both nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems such as
Winter Evening, Haymaking and Wood Pictures in summer celebrate the beauty of the world
and the certainties of rural life, where animals must be fed and crops harvested. Poems such as
Little Trotty Wagtail show his sharp observation of wildlife, though The Badger shows his lack
of sentiment about the place of animals in the countryside. At this time, he often used poetic
forms such as the sonnet and the rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more meditative
and use forms similar to the folk songs and ballads of his youth. An example of this is Evening.
His knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets. However,
poems such as I Amshow, a metaphysical depth on a par with his contemporary poets and many
of his pre-asylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics.

8.2.1 Clare’s Poems about Love

In his ‘The Morning mist is changing blue’, Clare focuses on a chance meeting with a pretty maid
and celebrates the effect this has upon him whereas in ‘I dreamt not what is to woo’ Clare adopts the

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