Believing in Poetry - John Clare

 Talk given by Nick Hervey 25/02/2018

I am going to talk this evening about John Clare, a poet whom I have loved and read since my teens. Clare was born in 1793, the son of a farm labourer. His biographer Jonathan Bate, has written that Clare is the greatest labouring-class poet that England ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully about nature, of a rural childhood, of poverty and of the alienated and unstable self. As a young man he was for a brief period of 18 months in 1820 and 1821 lionised in London as a new author on the London scene, was dubbed the peasant poet, and invited to London’s most fashionable salons. But then just as quickly he was dropped, and returned to his rural home at Helpston in Northamptonshire. This left him with a lifelong sense of alienation, not dissimilar to that of William Blake.
He continued to write poetry, but marriage, children, and the pressure to earn a living combined with the grinding poverty of rural life led to him becoming depressed. Eventually in July 1837, he went of his own volition to Dr Matthew Allen's private asylum, High Beach, in Epping Forest, in Essex. In 1841 he absconded from there and walked the 70 miles home to Northampton, believing that he was going to meet a long lost love from his childhood. Five months later he was admitted to Northampton Asylum where he remained for the rest of his life another 23 years.
Sarah Houghton-Walker has written the definitive account of John Clare’s religious views. Her view is that Clare’s poetic vision is informed by a religious awareness that is both intellectual and experiential. The latter is the key point. Clare had a profound spirituality, which was informed by his flirtation with Wesleyan Methodism. He liked Wesley’s focus on personal faith, and the emphasis on emotion and social justice. He believed that he didn’t need to go to church to feel close to God, although it is clear that he felt the church was the symbolic centre of life in the village, and there are many references to the tall spire of Glinton Church in his poems. I particularly like his poem, Sabbath Bells, which reflects his connection to the spiritual centre of local life.
 
I’ve often on a Sabbath day
Where pastoral quiet dwells,
Layn down amongst the new mown hay
To listen distant bells
That beautifully flung the sound
Upon the quiet wind
While beans in blossom breathed around
A fragrance o’er the mind
A fragrance and a joy beside
That never wears away
The very air seems deified
Upon a Sabbath day.
Although Clare was a traditionalist in religion and politics he combined a reverence for the social structures of rural society with a real sense of grievance at what he saw as the failure of the establishment to protect the poor. His poem the Parish was a critique of the failings of the early C19th church – the absenteeism from livings, which left the rural poor without the consolations of religion, a clergy that preferred to socialise with local landowners rather than tend to their parishioners, and the impact of tithes on the poor.
His poem the Woodman, explains the importance to local working people of God’s day of rest on Sunday when they could recharge their batteries, and whether in church or not could be brought to a proper acknowledgement of God’s blessings.
The Woodman
Nor can one miss the bliss from labour freed
Which poor men meeteth on a Sunday morn
Fixt in a chair some godly book to read
Or wandering round to view the crops and corn
In best cloaths fitted out and beard new shorn
Dropping a’down in some warm shelterd dell
Wi six days labour weak and weary worn
Listening around each distant chiming bell
That on the softening air melodiously doth swell
 
His pipe pufft out he edges in his chair
And stirs the embers up his hands to warm
And with his singing book he does repair
To humming o’er an anthem, hymn or psalm
And ere he slept he always breath’d a prayer
I thank thee Lord what thou to day didst give
Sufficient strength to toil I bless thy care
And thank thee still for what I may receive
And O Almighty God whilst I still live
My eyes it opened on the last days sun
Prepare thou me this wicked world to leave
And fit my passage ere my race is run
Tis all I beg o Lord thy heavenly will be done
Oh may the wretch that’s still on darkness living
The bible’s comforts hear by thee display’d
And many a woodman’s family forgiven
Have cause for blessing thee that led their way to Heaven
 
It is important to realise that the Bible took a prime place in Clare’s own reading, although like William Blake he always found divinity all around him in the little things of nature. In a prose piece he composed called Sketches in the Life, he explained his belief thus:
‘I feel a beautiful providence ever about me as my attendant deity – she casts her mantle about me when I am in trouble to shield me from it – she attends me like a nurse when I am in sickness, puts her gentle hand under my head to lift it out of pains way and lays it easy by laying hope for my pillow – she attends to my every weakness when I am doubting like a friend and keeps me from sorrow by showing me her pictures of happiness – then offering them up to my service – she places herself in the shadow that I may enjoy the sunshine and when my faith is sinking into despondency she opens her mind as a teacher to show me truth and give me wisdom.’
Although Clare was initially attracted to certain aspects of Wesleyan Methodism, including the outdoor services, the emphasis on personal faith, on social justice, he disliked the excesses of enthusiasm he saw there. He personally had a persistent experience of rapture in the presence of nature, and believed this provided a transcendent knowledge of a Christian God. It was a belief mediated through the idea of vision. His religion though was largely that of the God of the Old Testament, and he rarely mentioned Jesus, with one major exception. If you turn to Hymn 335 of the Hymns Ancient and Modern you will find it is based on a poem by John Clare, with music by Henry Carey. This poem expresses his sense that Jesus understood and cared for the sick and dispossessed, a group Clare identified himself with very strongly. It is called A stranger once did bless this earth.
 
A Stranger once did bless this earth
Who never caused a heart to mourn,
Whose very voice gave sorrows mirth;
And how did earth his worth return?
It spurned him from its lowliest lot
The meanest station owned him not.
 
An outcast thrown in sorrow’s way,
A fugitive that knew no sin,
Yet in lone places forced to stray;
Men would not take the stranger in.
Yet peace, though much himself he mourned,
Was all to others he returned.
 
His presence was a peace to all,
He bade the sorrowful rejoice.
Pain turned to pleasure at his call,
Health lived and issued from his voice;
He healed the sick, and sent abroad
The dumb rejoicing in the Lord.
 
The blind met daylight in his eye,
The joys of everlasting day;
The sick found health in his reply,
The cripple threw his crutch away.
Yet he with troubles did remain,
And suffered poverty and pain.
 
It was for sin he suffered all
To set the world-imprisoned free,
To cheer the weary when they call;
And who could such a stranger be?
The God, who hears each human cry,
And come, a Saviour, from on high.
 
Although Clare is best known as a poet of the natural world, he is also one of England’s greatest poets of childhood. This sometimes conspired to give the impression that he himself was childlike. But it would be a mistake to think this of him.  He remembered the joys of childhood precisely because he was acutely conscious of the pain and complexity of adulthood - its ups and downs. In his poetry he imagined childhood as a kind of Eden. He interpreted Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise as an allegory for growing up. He retained some of the wonderful imagination of childhood, although his own was not without its share of pain and toil, including as was the case for many at the time, the death of several young siblings.
I love this poem called Graves of Infants, in which Clare compares their fleeting stay on earth to a flower’s bud, flowering and passing
Infants’ graves are steps of Angels where
Earth’s brightest gems of innocence repose
God is their parent, they need no tear,
He takes them to his bosom from earth’s woes;
A bud their lifetime and a flower their close
Their spirits are an iris of the skies.
Needing no prayers – a sunset’s happy close.
Gone are the bright rays of their soft blue eyes
Flow’rs weep in dew-drops o’er them and the gale gently sighs.
Their lives were nothing but a sunny shower
Melting on flowers as tears melt from the eye
Their death were dew drops on Heaven’s amaranthine bower.
 
I want to end with one of Clare’s most famous poems which relates to his struggle for a sense of self-worth and identity, and his depression. The first verse expresses his sense of his abandonment and fears of oblivion. His feeling that life has wrung him out. The middle verse expresses regret at his lost aspirations, and the last expresses his longing to be accepted into the arms of God, and to rest in peace from the toils of this world. It is called 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.
Although Clare’s life seems sad he left us all a wonderful legacy of poetry that is full of the wonders of God’s nature, and owing to a small band of enthusiasts he was finally recognised for the wonderful poet he is when in 1989 Ted Hughes was among those who formally inducted him into Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. Hughes then read Clare’s “The Nightingale’s Nest”, one of the greatest bird poems in the language, and those assembled sang Clare’s hymn “A stranger once did bless the earth.” A fitting memorial to a great poet.
 
Further Reading:
 
John Clare : A Biography by Jonathan Bate [Picador 2003]
John Clare’s Religion by Sarah Houghton-Walker [Aldershot Ashgate 2009]