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Elective English—III

Notes persona of a woman who describes the complexity of the pain and pleasure experienced when
uncertainty characterises a relationship. First Love’s Recollections is characterised by a yearning
for what has gone before. Throughout the poem the speaker nostalgically reflects on an earlier
period in his life when Mary, possibly Mary Joyce, with whom Clare fell in love, a woman who
was to become his muse and as he described metaphorically his “second wife”, responded to his
love and life seemed full of possibilities. In An Invite to Eternity, Clare, uncharacteristically,
moves away from the natural landscape and sets his poem in a world beyond death. On the other
hand, in Love and Memory, the speaker remains alive and his ladylove dies. As we know, Mary
Joyce died young at the age of 41; it is possible to read this poem as Clare’s testament of his loss,
and of the pain, he experiences having only memories left to create images of Mary. The Spring
returns, the pewit screams, like several others we have encountered, deals with the loss of love
and in particular Clare’s loss of Mary Joyce whereas Say what is love is another short poem that
deals with Clare’s loss of Mary Joyce. In short rhyming couplets, he traces the pain of loss and
attempts to unravel the nature of love. In contrast to some of the sentiments about love, readers
have seen in the collection so far, Love Lives beyond the Tomb appear to celebrate the enduring
nature of love that the speaker asserts lives beyond death.

8.3 Revival of Interest in the 20th Century

Clare was relatively forgotten during the later 19th century, but interest in his work was revived
by Arthur Symons in 1908, Edmund Blunden in 1920 and John and Anne Tibble in their
ground-breaking 1935 2-volume edition. Benjamin Britten set some of ‘May’ from A Shepherd’s
Calendar in his Spring Symphony of 1948, and included a setting of The Evening Primrose in his
Five Flower Songs.

Copyright too much of his work has been claimed since 1965 by the editor of the Complete
Poetry, Professor Eric Robinson, though these claims were contested. Recent publishers have
refused to acknowledge the claim (especially in recent editions from Faber and Carcanet) and it
seems the copyright is now defunct.

The largest collection of original Clare manuscripts are housed at Peterborough Museum and
Art Gallery, where they are available to view by appointment.
Tampering with what Clare actually wrote continued into the later twentieth century; sadly,
even Helen Gardner felt the need to emend not only the punctuation but also the spelling and
grammar in The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950 (1972).
Since 1993, the John Clare Society of North America has organised an annual session of scholarly
papers concerning John Clare at the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of
America.

Notes The John Clare Trust in 2005 bought the thatched cottage where he was born.
In May 2007 the Trust gained £1.27m of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and
commissioned Jefferson Sheard Architects to create a new landscape design and Visitor
Centre, including a cafe, shop and exhibition space. The Cottage at 12 Woodgate, Helpston
has been restored using traditional building methods and is open to the public.
In 2013, the John Clare Trust received a further grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to
help preserve the building and provide educational activities for youngsters visiting the
cottage.

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