The Humanity of John Clare

 by Hamish Critchley

John Clare is now recognized as one of the greatest English Romantic poets, after years of indifference and neglect. Born in 1793 into a peasant family in the small English village of Helpston. Despite his disadvantaged background - both of his parents were virtually illiterate - Clare did receive some formal schooling as a youth. Reading in his spare time, his favourite books included Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Despite his education, the work he did out of financial necessity consisted largely of manual labour such as threshing, ploughing, or lime-burning. He began writing poetry after reading James Thompson's Seasons and after accumulating a substantial collection, John Taylor (who also published the work of John Keats) published the Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. The success of this first collection allowed him to get married to Martha “Patty” Turner and keep his parents out of the workhouse, but not enough to sustain themselves, Clare once more took up manual labour in 1820. His mother Ann Stimson couldn't read or write and, like most country people, thought printed words were a form of witchcraft, and Clare's own poetry can be read as a form of magic. As spells manipulate the external environment to reflect the internal mind of the sorcerer, literature controls the external environment to present the internal. Clare, like any good wizard - wisened by forest and toughened by wind - mirrors his mind onto the natural world, revealing himself within nature and poetry as magic.

Tom Paulin describes that “there is an animism in claire which suffuses his treatment of living things, making them absolutely and uniquely themselves, yet at the same time the natural representatives of the haynish poet who so lovingly observes and describes them”, this thesis is present in his poem ‘The Badger’.

The badger grunting on his woodland track

With shaggy hide and sharp nose scrowed with black

Roots in the bushes and the woods, and makes

A great high burrow in the ferns and brakes.

With nose on ground he runs an awkard pace,

And anything will beat him in the race.

The shepherd’s dog will run him to his den

Followed and hooted by the dogs and men.

He makes the Badger charismatic and endearing, with its ‘grunting’ and ‘shaggy hide’, the reader is encouraged to view the badger as an equal, which makes the hunt of the dogs and men seem like an injustice - to disturb his ‘awkard’ charm. Clare often used the word ‘haynish’ to describe himself, a dialect word meaning ‘awkward’, so in this badger's unorthodox charism, we are also encouraged to interpret the Badger as an incarnation of Clare himself. A unique animal, grunting along, whilst also a representative of the poet himself. He uses poetry as an instrument to magically transform himself into a badger, ‘running a pace’ from men who fear his nature. 

Paulin continues that “Clare is both the unlearned shepard, who discovers the scribbled eggs laid by the yellowhammer or ‘writing lark’, and he is the literary bird himself”, which connotes Clare’s fascination with birds, writing a series of bird poems, the most infamous being ‘To the Snipe’ which ends with -

Thy solitudes

The unbounded heaven esteems

And here my heart warms into higher moods

And dignifying dreams

I see the sky

Smile on the meanest spot

Giving to all that creep or walk or flye

A calm and cordial lot

Thine teaches me

Right feelings to employ

That in the dreariest places peace will be

A dweller and a joy

This poem develops his use of animals to embody his identity, but unlike the badger which acts as an extended metaphor for Clare himself, the snipe represents what he envies, rather than what he is. A desire for solitude in nature, but also a joy that withstands its environment. Like humanity before him and after him, he looks to nature to help comprehend life; help to understand how to feel ‘joy’ in the ‘dreariest places’. Whilst Clare places the snipe in the role of ‘teacher’ which emphasises a separation between him and the bird, but also an admirable and aspirational position. Furthermore, the focus on environment and location is also present in the poem's opening.

Lover of swamps

The quagmire overgrown

With hassock tufts of sedge--where fear encamps

Around thy home alone

The trembling grass

Quakes from the human foot

Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass

Where thou alone and mute

As the opening line directly ties the Snipe to its environment, Clare encourages the reader to deduce that the bird’s are primarily a feature of their location rather than an individual animal. Furthermore, the untouched natural world Clare creates offers security and safety - the grass so vulnerable and unused to humanity that it ‘quakes’ from the foot and can't ‘bear the weight of man’. The motif of an unaffected world, and the importance of environment in defining identity, are both also demonstrated in ‘Shadows of Taste’.

‘Shadows of Taste’ explores the development of taste alongside the development of humanity and animals. He maintains the magic inside poetry by mirroring the ‘spells’ of nature:

To follow taste and all her sweets explore

And edens make where deserts spread before

In poesys spells some all their raptures find

And revel in the melodies of mind

Clares poetry recreates the outer external environment, and in the same way the ‘poesys’  reveals what ‘raptures’ humanity, he makes a world through magical printed word that, through the same spell, the poesys scent does too. Both ‘revel in the melodies of the mind’, both use their magic to tune into imagination. Clare builds on this later in the poem as he writes of ‘a blossom in its witchery of bloom’. Clare continues to develop the link between poetry and nature elsewhere in the poem.

Where meads and brooks and forests basking lie

Lasting truth and the eternal sky

Thus truth to nature as the true sublime

Stands a mount atlas overbearing time

…

Yet truth to nature will in all remain

As grass in winter glorifies the plain

And over fashions foils rise proud and high

As lights bright fountain in a cloudy sky

If poetry is an investigation of truth, then if poetry to nature is ‘the true sublime’, the sublime being a feeling beyond calculation, Clare reveals that the venture to successfully encapsulate nature in poetry is the greatest sorcery known to humankind. Clare is aware of the life span of his poetry - he knows it to be ‘lasting’ and will outlast him - but this is then dwarfed by the eternity of nature and the ‘sky’. He then depicts the changing of human taste, which amplifies the tension between his mortality and nature's immortality. Despite the change in tastes of poetry which realises his fears of transience, poetry's focus still manages to ‘glorify the plain’, even in hard times. Poetry, Clare declares, can comfort as well as throw you into an existential crisis, whilst also being able to alter reality and ‘glorify the plain’, a multifaceted potion for realising our mortality. Clare continues that landscape and the collective defines beauty and the individual. 

Will all the raptures of his mind engross

And bright winged insects on the flowers of may

Shine pearls too wealthy to be cast away

His joys run riot mid each juicy blade

Of grass where insects revel in the shade 

…

Some recordless rapture love to breath

Natures wild eden wood and field and heath

In common blades of grass his thoughts will raise

A world of beauty to admire and praise

Until his heart oerflows with swarms of thought

…

But take these several beings from their homes

Each beautious thing a withered thought becomes

Association fades and like a dream

They are but shadows of the things they seem

This uncovers Clare’s fascination with nature as a collective rather than just individual animals and organisms. He uses a series of plural nouns, ‘insects’, ‘flowers’, ‘blades of grass’, and ‘swarms’, which all help to create the image of an ecosystem in its entirety. And in this collective environment, there lies a ‘world of beauty’ which the ‘thoughts will raise’. Beauty lies in being placed within the environment, a factor which Clare attempts to re-create through his poetry. He builds ‘a world of beauty to admire and praise’ to place the reader inside, a spell to transport them inside his world re-created in the printed word. Clare continues to discuss the impact of context and environment on identity, as he declares that without your environment, you are a mere shadow. This metaphor directly ties the substance of people and identity to their environment, and suggests appearances are shadows, and the external world is what lies under it. 

The disconnect between appearance and identity/environment was very apparent in Clare's own life, who was diagnosed with ‘insanity’ 3 times in his life - constrained to two insane asylums in his lifetime, one in Epping Forest and the other in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum , the latter of which he died in. He escaped the private asylum in Epping Forest after staying there for 4 years, which he wrote about in an autobiographical prose piece ‘Journey out of excess’, which depicts the four day walk where he slept outside and ate nothing but grass. It exemplifies Paulin's statement that ‘This is not landscape… this is wilderness’ - Clare's focus lies in nature itself and not in the controlled human affected idyll of the traditional image of the English countryside. In this snippet of autobiography, Clare depicts a divide within himself, he writes to begin his journey that with ‘only honest courage and myself in my army I led the way and my troops soon followed.’ By referring to himself as a plural ‘troops’ suggests he has a divided persona, whilst the separation of them to the personal pronoun creates an unsettling image that he is unsure who, if anyone, is in control of his actions. His divided persona is also uncovered through his unreliability, he writes that he ‘satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the side of the road side which seemed to taste something like bread’. Whilst revealing his desperate state, pushed to eating grass like livestock, the simile ‘something like bread’ suggests his senses are unreliable - after days of starvation, and his inconstancy, although understandable, makes him unreliable and further develops his adverse mental state. This is made more poignant when, on his return home, he says ‘So here I am homeless at home and half gratified to feel that I can be happy anywhere’ which discloses his displacement. Despite walking for four days - half starved and with injured feet - he still feels as though he doesn't belong anywhere. This heart wrenching statement is made worse by the fact that he seems used to it - he says it almost as a relief to end his story - a predictable end. Whilst the idea of being ‘happy anywhere’ harks back to ‘Snipe’ which he stated helped him realise ‘that in the dreariest places peace [there] will be / A dweller and a joy’. He has learned from the snipe that, even when faced with the harshness of nature and the degrading of the mind, he can still find happiness. However, this ‘joy’ is called into question, as if he is an unreliable narrator, then the emotions he confesses to should be taken with a large pinch of salt. After returning home, he stayed with Patty for a few months, who claimed he was much better and that she ‘wished to try him for a while’, before being diagnosed with insanity in December 1841 and sent to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum which he stayed in, unvisited, till his death in 1864. It was in this asylum he wrote arguably his most famous poem - ‘I am’

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

This poem divulges Clare's struggle with his identity - he expresses a contrast between his mental identity, which he feels none ‘cares or knows’ - where both verbs connote an emotional, mental state - and his physical state of being alive, ‘and yet I am, and live’. His wish for an untouched place now takes a different tone, before, it seemed a desire to see nature in its original form, but in ‘I am’ it feels like a life line - creating this world which he knows doesn't exist, using poetry’s magic as a flare in the dark. A reminder of his form and his humanity.