Can someone be so much of a Somewhere — so rooted in a place — that the loss of that home could drive them mad? The tragic story of the poet John Clare (1793-1864) would suggest so. A contemporary of the Romantics, Clare was neither an aristocrat like Byron nor a grammar school boy like Wordsworth and Keats, but a farm labourer. And when the Enclosure Acts transformed his birthplace, he was so devastated by the loss of his familiar landscape and way of life that he fell gradually into depression, panic attacks, alcohol abuse and finally psychosis.
Born in 1793 in Helpston, a rural hamlet north of Peterborough, to a barely literate farm labourer father and an illiterate mother, Clare spent most of his working life as a labourer, despite at one point during his lifetime outselling John Keats. Only haphazardly educated, he fell wildly in love with the written word after encountering James Thomson’s The Seasons. He began writing his own verse — at first mainly about the natural world — on whatever scraps of paper he could find, or on his hat when he had no paper.
Clare first sought a publisher in the hope of raising money to stop his parents being evicted from their tenement. When a lucky contact brought him to Taylor & Hessey, his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1820 to wild acclaim.
Clare stands out among the poets of the Romantic era for his understanding of and communion with the natural world he describes. Contemporaries treated the natural world more as emotional stimulus: in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey“, for example, landscape is observed, but with little knowledge. Wordsworth’s “plots of cottage-grounds” are “clad in one green hue”, and this is chiefly an anchor for moral reflection, a means of “hearing oftentimes/The still sad music of humanity”.
Clare, on the other hand, was critical of this mix of ignorance and sentimentality, saying of Keats that “his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies, and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described”.
Landscape, to Clare, was not a source of high emotion but home, livelihood, work, family and the richness of plant and animal life. His vistas brim with too much knowledge to seem painterly, or to be turned easily into moral metaphor. Colour is shorthand for a natural and farmed landscape intimately known, as these fields in “A Sunday With Shepherds and Herdboys”:
Square plats of clover red and white
Scented wi’ summer’s warm delight
And sinkfoil of a fresher stain
And different greens of varied grain
In Keats’s famous “Ode to a Nightingale” the bird herself is not even described, serving instead as the focus for reflections on death, history and emotional rapture by a poet “half in love with easeful death”; Clare’s hushed, intimate “The Nightingale’s Nest” is both more prosaic and, in a sense, more faithful to the bird. For Keats, she is a “light-winged Dryad of the trees”. In contrast, Clare describes the materials used to build her nest and, with hushed empathy, the terrified bird:
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SubscribeThank you for these fascinating insights to a unique poet. Your comparisons of Clare’s and Keats’ descriptions of the natural world are especially revealing, and Clare’s distress at the ravaging of nature presages the alarm we all feel now at the oh too rapid erosion of flora and fauna. I listened again to Rory Kinnear and Eva Green reciting “I am” in Penny Dreadful. An extraordinary and beautiful rendition.