POETS Day! John Clare
Linocut by Rene Sears
You may have to shop. If you get too much from Amazon, they know. The thought actually counts and a bit of wear on your shoe leather should be on display.
It’s like wrapping. A perfect bow with the curly ribbons you get from running a scissor along the length real quick like you’re pull starting a chainsaw is wonderful to look at, but if you’re a twenty year old college guy with stylishly unkempt hair and smell like cherry vape, everyone knows you didn’t wrap that gift yourself. Small tears on the corners and a piece of masking tape, because the scotch tape ran out, lets grandma know you care.
That doesn’t mean shopping should impinge on regularly scheduled loafing time. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of a useless lame duck Friday afternoon. Shopping isn’t fun, but getting out of work always is.
Before you do, take a minute for some verse.
***
“Many reviewers greeted John Clare with enthusiasm, hoping for a noble savage, an uncomplicated mind, freed from the artificial systems inculcated by formal education. Such fanciful suggestions of his isolation from the world of books have proved remarkably persistent. His eagerness to see his work in print has too often been forgotten in the various dubious attempts to portray him as innocent of the vicious preoccupations of the publishing trade.” – Paul Chirico
Several things had happened. In 1800, Robert Bloomfield erupted from seemingly nowhere selling a quick twenty-five thousand copies of The Farmer’s Boy; a labor class (labour in la lingua anglaise) kid whose little formal education but increased talent folded into a public taste bent towards Wordsworth and his Romanticism. The idea that poetry sprung from nature, pure and unadulterated by aristocratic letters was heady stuff in the early 1800s. The even larger eruption of George Gordon, Lord Byron on the scene in 1819, showed a public thirsty for, and kindled the concept of, stardom.
When John Clare, the son of a farm worker and illiterate mother, released Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820, man met moment, however briefly.
A brief word on Paul Chirico, author of the above quote: Dr. Chirico is College Lecturer, Director of Studies in English, and Senior Tutor of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, although that information isn’t very easy to find online. If you Google “Paul Chirico,” you’re treated to several pages of links to IMDB, TV Guide, Amazon Video, and the like for Paul Chirico the actor. According to his IMDB page, he’s done a lot of classic theater in addition to appearances on FBI, Grimm, and Escape the Night. I suspect the actor’s a clever guy in his own right, but I feel bad for Dr. Chirico. Fame, even before Byron, doesn’t require and often overshadows scholarship.
Though, John Clare was not without scholarship. His formal education was lean and fitful. He’d attend classes for months at a time between harvests and other needs of the farm. There were spates of night classes even when the farmwork took his days. He wasn’t entirely self-taught. He wasn’t nature’s virginal mouthpiece, but that’s what people wanted, so he became “The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet.”
Mouse’s Nest
John Clare (1793-1864)I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away;
And when I looked I fancied something stirred,
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird —
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats
With all her young ones hanging at her teats;
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me,
I ran and wondered what the thing could be,
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood;
Then the mouse hurried from the craking brood.
The young ones squeaked, and as I went away
She found her nest again among the hay.
The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.
He’s a very pretty writer. His rustic scenes benefit from his experience in the fields and country. Whatever cobbling together of instruction and self-teaching scholars make of his education, it seems it added to rather than supplanted what was common knowledge to the peasantry. In the case of speech, the rustic took precedent over the learned. In the case of grammar, Wikipedia notes that he called it a “bitch.”
The full quote is from a letter to his publisher, John Taylor who also published Keats:
“I may alter but I cannot mend – grammer in learning is like tyranny in government – confound the bitch will never be her slave & have a vast good mind not to alter the verse in question.”
Poetry Foundation credits biographer R. K. R. Thornton with finding the following from Clare:
“do I write intelligable I am generally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons &c & for the very reason that altho they are drilled hourly daily weekly by every boarding school Miss who pretends to gossip in correspondence they do not know their proper exercise for they even set grammarians at loggerheads and no one can asign them their proper places.”
Over time, countless editors have had their hand in correcting Clare’s spelling and adding punctuation where there was none or altering where there was. Interspersed were efforts to undo such editorial efforts in hope of restoring the works to their original state. There are many versions of his poems out there. I should note that I took all of the ones in this post as written in Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2, 6th Edition and cross referenced where possible with older volumes from Project Gutenberg. I think Norton got it right. If not, efforts were made.
It’s said they got along well, but Clare and Taylor exchanged testy letters over his speech. He was too colloquial. His patron complained. They wanted authentic peasant observations, but not authentic authentic. He rankled under all that.
Clare was a curmudgeonly smart guy who spent his farming days pausing whatever hoeing or pig rustling was the task of the hour to jot down a few verses. I read he’d carry a pencil nub in the fields and write lines on the brim of his hat. There were jobs in pubs and making quicklime, but all lower-class stuff. He saved money to buy a presentable blank book, copied down the poems he’d auditioned for his parents (he kept it a secret that the poems were his in order to get their honest assessment), managed to get the book in the hands of Keats’ publisher, and sold to acclaim.
It’s a wonderful story if you cut his biography short and stop right there.
The second book didn’t sell as well but critics lauded his development as a poet. The third sold less still, more development. It seemed the better he got, at least according to critics, the less popular he became. He went from being Paul Chirico to being Paul Chirico, and depression set in. He became erratic. In one instance he apparently got into a yelling match with whatever poor soul played Shylock during a production of The Merchant of Venice.
He was admitted to an asylum in 1836. In 1841, he released himself on his own recognizance and walked eighty some odd miles home. His wife put up with his antics on his return for a while, but checked into a second asylum in the last week of that year. He would remain an institutional ward for the rest of his life.
I Am
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.
According to Dr Matthew Allen, proprietor of the first asylum Clare resided at, he managed to be sane when writing poetry no matter how manic he behaved otherwise; a poetic Mel Tillis, so to speak. Wikipedia provides this from the doctor:
“It is most singular that ever since he came… the moment he gets pen or pencil in hand he begins to write most poetical effusions. Yet he has never been able to obtain in conversation, nor even in writing prose, the appearance of sanity for two minutes or two lines together, and yet there is no indication of insanity in any of his poetry.”
Maybe. He wrote some pretty crazy things. At points he claimed he was Shakespeare or Byron. He added stanzas to Don Juan.
Paul Dean reviews I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare edited by Jonathan Bate, in the article “John Clare: freedom & enclosure” (The New Criterion, December 2003). He cites this bit from Clare’s Don Juan.
Lord Byron, poh—the man wot writes the werses
And is just what he is and nothing more,
Who with his pen lies like the mist disperses
And makes all nothing as it was before,
Who wed two wives and oft the truth rehearses
And might have had some twenty thousand more,
Who has been dead, so fools their lies are giving,
And still in Allen’s madhouse caged and living.
He’s luxuriating in his fantasies, pitting down on Byron because he can’t exist as broadly as he imagines himself to exist.
The Dean article is worth a read. He pins Clare’s distress as “spiritual claustrophobia” caused by changes in English law. It’s an interesting idea. Before 1809, when Clare was a boy, the meadows near his home were free to wander. After the Enclosure Act for Helpston of 1809, the land was divided and sold, made private and off limits to trespassers. Clare wrote of freedom and cathedrals of woods and such. Far from being restricted to a cell, he was allowed the run of both asylums’ lands. To read about it, the places seem isolated and surrounded by natural tranquility, places for worship.
He married Patty Turner, but he fell in love with Mary Joyce as a youth, kept apart by her father. He’s referred to as promiscuous, but I have no details to share. Only that he seems to have loved Mary throughout his life and beyond hers. She died in 1938, though Clare never accepted it, continuing to believe her alive.
It was of Mary he’s said to have written when he speaks of “the eyes of fair woman.”
Clare’s reputation rises and falls. There are claimed instances of a revival, but dispersed over the years at regular intervals. It may be his lot to be on the cusp. He’s a talented poet, inventive with words, and keen in his observations. The language is musical and the right amount of rustic.
Song [I peeled bits of straw]
I peeled bits of straw and I got switches too
From the gray peeling willow as idlers do,
And I switched at the flies as I sat all alone
Till my flesh, blood, and marrow was turned to dry bone.
My illness was love, though I knew not the smart,
But the beauty of love was the blood of my heart.
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And fled to the silence of sweet solitude,
Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades,
Unseen of all shepherds and flower-loving maids—
The hermit bees find them but once and away;
There I’ll bury alive and in silence decay.I looked on the eyes of fair woman too long,
Till silence and shame stole the use of my tongue:
When I tried to speak to her I’d nothing to say,
So I turned myself round and she wandered away.
When she got too far off, why, I’d something to tell,
So I sent sighs behind her and walked to my cell.
Willow switches I broke and peeled bits of straws,
Ever lonely in crowds, in nature’s own laws—
My ballroom the pasture, my music the bees,
My drink was the fountain, my church the tall trees.
Who ever would love or be tied to a wife
When it makes a man mad all the days of his life?
