John Clare
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 tossedInto 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.
Years ago, I went on a course, seeking to enhance my teaching of English, in order to be able to ‘bail out’ from the Church of England, ditch ‘The Collar’, return to ‘Civvy Street’. For years, it had been borne in upon me, that the C of E, the Church of my Baptismal birth, had been taken over by people whose aim was to destroy it, the Church that I loved. I had seen it happening over years, if not decades: my Old Testament Tutor, had been reduced to inchoate silence, when I declared that, at the very least, I had to believe that something momentous had happened when the Prophet Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. ‘Does not compute’ would, I think, be today’s response: I was at the ne plus ultra of then Theological Colleges – stratospheric in its height, where such Biblicism was least expected. Why was I not at Ridley Hall, or Wycliffe? Had I been, they could have patronised me, smiled at me, metaphorically patted my shoulder, murmuring ‘there, there’, ‘you’ll get over it.’
The course was about John Clare, of whose poetry, I was largely ignorant – ‘I love the fitful gust’ being about all I’d come across – and not thinking much of it. ‘Q’s Oxford volume on Poetry, found room only for ‘I am’: no more.
At School, we’d been introduced to Keats’s poetry, which I’ve loved ever since: hard not to love the Romantic poet, even without his Consumption, care of his dying brother – knowing it was a death-sentence for him – and care, too, for the unfortunately-named Fanny Brawne, (his ‘Bright Star…?) whom he durst not kiss, lest thereby co-infecting her.
The course-leader whose name was propitious, being that of Keats’ publisher, more than a century earlier, had sent us some ‘Prep’, encouraging us to write – poetry…
So ‘Here’s one I made earlier’:
May-Bug
Returning to my room quite late last night
I found a May-Bug blund’ring round the light;
Disgust, at first, annoyance then: ‘How dare
This stupid creature penetrate my lair?’‘I’ll squash him with this book, and then at least.
I’ll sleep in peace.’ But the poor ugly beast
Lay on the floor, beneath the window-ledge –
Lay there, or sat, quite calm as though no edgeOf Damoclean Sword suspended hung
T’extinguish it, nor no noose swung
Hungry for execution; or as though
It knew all these, and accepted as just so:It knew them and accepted, as it must
Perils of bats and swallows, just as just –
Or unjust. Meek, still and quiet now it lay;
Outside died mine, inside now closed its day.No longer in my hand the uplifted book,
But now, tumbler and card I gently took
Him to my window – now his door – and shook
Him to his native twilight. To my bookI turned: John Clare: The Oxford Authors. Had
That gentle spirit stayed my hand and bade
Me let the May-Bug live? – or had I learned
From him some patience, and some Truth discerned?

‘Our’ John Taylor, perhaps following Lord David Cecil’s (‘The Wounded Deer’) seeing John Newton’s uncompromising Evangelicalism as triggering Cowper’s recurrent descents into madness, found a similar pattern in the robuster Ploughman-poet (“I kicked it out of the clods”) John Clare. According to this John Taylor, a kind of Faustian bargain was struck John Clare’s verses would be published – provided that he kept to a kind of ‘Chocolate box’ sterilised pasteurised, prettified picture of rural harmony and peace, centred on the village Church… One can almost hear the patronising ‘interest’ taken by one such – ‘So, tell me, Clare, how did you come to write your verses? ‘I kicked ‘em out of the clods.’[I like to think of that line as growled, snarled, even.]
His madness involved the complete dissolution of his identity, imagining Mary, the first love whose father would not countenance his daughter marrying such a scape grace as Clare, being his actual wife, while his actual wife, who bore him three children, became in his bewildered mind another person, so he trudged mile upon mile from the Asylum, vainly seeking his home, and his Mary, although the ‘Mary’ of whom he wrote, was no idealised frail young nineteenth century woman.
Who lives where Beggars rarley* speed?**
And leads a humdrum life indeed
As none beside herself would lead
My MaryWho lives where noises never cease?
And what wi’ hogs and ducks, and geese
Can never have a minutes peace?
My MaryWho (save in sunday bib and tuck)
Goes daily (waddling like a duck)
O’er head and ears in grease and muck
My Mary
[Clare’s spelling* was erratic – much as our spelling had always been ** I think he uses this in its older sense of ‘succeed’ or thrive…]
Do read it all, not least for when the ‘baby’s all besh*t’, and for the general tone of exasperated fondness, that at least, verges on love.
He wrote often of the sound of Church Bells; as I noticed, he seems always to have been outside Church, and, in any case, there might very well not have been an Organ in those days, so I wrote a little ‘pastiche’ for him, as an exercise, and to fill this gap. Yer ‘tis, as we’d’say:
Sweet the Organ pipes do sound
Re-echoing along the aisle,
Reverberating round and round,
The Diapason and the Viole!
How sweet the Organ’s sound!Now the Trumpet’s brassy tongue
Awakes the soul of some dead Knight,
Recumbent in his tomb: too young
He died. Oh let him wake, so bright,
So sweet the Trumpet’s Sound!Now the Dulciana soft
Scarce stirs the air with subtle tone,
And now the Voix Celeste doth waft
Its beating notes: a heart of stone,
Would melt at this sweet sound!Acid tone of Oboe now
Picks out a descant, cool and clear.
Entranced the list’ner wonders how
This register may have a peer:
Sweet, sweet, the Oboe’s sound!Cornopean, Fifteenth too –
With Mixtures, coupled Great and Swell,
Oh, such a sound brings Heav’n in view,
And banishes the fear of Hell!
O, grand the Organ’s sound!
Brighton, July 1985
[in imitation of Clare’s ‘Evening Bells’]
If I unearth the piece I wrote as a kind of ‘requiem’ for him, I’ll scarf (scarph?) it in, but it was handwritten on one of those ‘Students Notepads’, and my filing system is like Bevan’s ‘secret of the Fund’, but I recall that back then I’d been astonished by the exactitude of his knowledge of Ornithology and Botany. When I was in Infants School, although there was a ‘Nature Table’ in the class-room, we were no longer led on Nature Walks, the Attlee-era having consigned such things to ‘Room 101’; the Hall, with its worn parquet floor, splinters from which, often embedding themselves in my bare legs, clad only in what the shop-man embarrassingly wrote down as ‘Knickers’, was walled about with cases of stuffed birds, which were all removed at some point, one soon becoming inured to the resulting bareness, finding that the local Museum was similarly ousting all its glass-fronted rows of Taxidermy: had a diktat been promulgated from County Hall, declaring such things ‘counter-revolutionary’? As if Spender’s verses on Pylons to celebrate the Scientism of the new regime, were to be the model… Yet they could have been used to great educational-effect, delineating how we are shaped by muscles and tendons as well as by skeletons… I think it was probably in the 1950’s, that my love of the past became my idee fixe. John Clare would, I am sure, have found in me a kindred spirit, many of his poems lamenting the changes brought in, not only by the Enclosures, but by what would now merely be ascribed to impersonal forces: Change; Progress; modernisation; Reform… For him, change was more personal: he almost identified with the places that were being remorselessly changed in his lifetime – an oak tree, a meadow, the way Farmers were beginning to ape their ‘betters’, their daughters to scorn their mothers’ way of useful skills, pursuing more ladylike pursuits, and, in the process, disdaining their local admirers…as was probably Clare’s fate. – he was certainly rebuffed by the father of one he loved; what a father thought, then, weighing far more heavily in the balance than what a dutiful daughter might ever venture to suggest. Another pen, at about the same time, was being drawn inexhaustibly across reams of paper by a similarly thwarted lover, Kilvert, whose prospects might have been much fairer than those of a plough boy, but, so long as they were mere prospects, depending upon a death and even then uncertain, would not soften the heart of however so kindly a relative, who had a young woman’s care. Before the ‘Married Woman’s Property Act’ of 1882, there was no legal security for the possessions of an Heiress, so predatory males were to be found sniffing around not for sex, but for that equally impelling thing: Property.
John Clare had to get his mother to save the sugar-paper, for him to exercise and extend his skills in writing, let alone literacy. I have known people – boys, mostly – who have been denied their right to literacy, because (I nearly wrote a qualifying ‘largely’) of the doctrinaire Educational Establishment’s enslavement to now-exploded notions engendered by the U.S. ‘look-say’ methods. R-A-T: RA-T Rat, ‘word-building’, was abandoned in favour of apparently loftier aims. I found the reality was that, whereas my Sixth Formers in 1966, could actually read what was written, a year later, it was not so: we had to read around, and aloud ‘little words’ such as ‘not’, but’, ‘nor’ , having become a matter of guesstimate.
No wonder Thomas Gray wrote in the 1760’s
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his Country’s Blood.
John Clare too, knew the sting of being patronised, disprised, discounted: the well-to-do rarely account for what their mere wealth has given them. So, what is there constant for him to hold fast upon, who has had nothing? No wonder Keats wrote for his own epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name is writ in water.’ Clare, like Keats, wrote for immortality, spurred on by something akin to the consumptive’s sense of ‘Times’ winged chariot hovering near.’ ‘I am’ virtually embodies this sense of being unjustly denied, excluded, passed over. For him, there was a double-exclusion: to be ‘taken up’ by others also meant being rejected by his own class, for having ‘ideas above his station’: he could get published only by stepping aside from his own ‘class’; but, in so doing, his own ‘class’ rejects him, and all the while, the things he clings to for support, are themselves being destroyed.
‘ Ye injur’d fields ere while so gay
When natures hand display’d
Long waving rows of Willows gray
And clumps of Hawthorn shade
But now alas your awthorn bowers
All desolate we see
The tyrants hand their shade devours
And cuts down every tree…’
This is the opening of his lament for Helpston Green. Helpston Green will have been a ‘common’ – land ‘belonging’ to no one, so everyone – part of the pre-Reformation patrimony that allowed some to subsist, until the wealthy were able to use their power to extinguish even that little remainder, and reduce those poor to abject poverty, which the poaching laws efficiently protected! So, much as the ‘Radical’ Cobbett had to flee to America to avoid being transported to the Penal Colonies, or indeed, simply hanged, John Clare has to swallow the bitter pill of poverty, seeing the merely wealthy having the power to effect changes far-reaching that disrupt the lives of others, and of which, they are oblivious and uncaring.. But how much more economic; efficient
– once all other things have been taken into, or left out of, account.
Gray wrote his famous Elegy, in 1750/51 (remember, the year began at different times and took some time to settle on January the first, often being linked to the regnal year of the sovereign (‘In the year that King Uzziah died’ – Isaiah 6; cf. Luke’s ‘triple dating’ of his Gospel). We still have a ‘financial year’, beginning in April, lest our financial experts should have to do some hard
sums, and take our money from us in a riot-threatening welter of dates and numbers. When the Calendar was ‘reformed’ in 1752, the cry ‘Give us back our eleven days!’was as much an inchoate roar against a Government claiming jurisdiction over Time itself and our own mortality, as a pragmatic complaint about pay. I was in New College’s fairly new MCR, when Mr. Wilson presided over Devaluation in 1967, and insulted the intelligence of his television audience, by declaring, ‘This does not mean that the Pound, here in Britain, in your pocket or purse…’.Wilson had been a Tutor in Economics at New College, never rising to a Fellowship there; New College’s Warden at the time had been Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Moscow, who had happened to be in that post when the Vassal business erupted, his subsequent sideways move being celebrated, in those so innocent days of ‘B & K’ by a couple of thunderflashes let off in the Cloisters unleashing squads of bull-necked security men, as though they owned the place. Clare would, I feel sure, have been, if anything, on the side of those who stood for this Country, rather than those whose aim was for his country’s subjection to her enemies.
Of course, every man wishes to conscript his heroes to his own side, and I admit to my partiality
here, but, would a John Clare who almost personally, painfully, felt the sense of loss for ‘Helpston Green’ not also have loudly lamented much else needlessly cast aside,[read’The Stripping of the Altars’] destroyed, as so much had been at the Reformation, and where much the same sort of people had made a lot of money for themselves; their consciences being salved by their using a fraction of what else was ‘ill-gotten gains’ to found, typically, schools: see the number founded in King Edward the VI’s time. And then a few centuries later, another wave of ‘Reform’ was let loose – see ‘Hiram’s Hospital’ in Trollope’s ‘The Warden’. In the time of the sickly little son of ‘ bluff King Hal’, his minders cottoned on to the fact that ‘Reform’ and ‘Reformation’ were talismans, ‘double-sixes’, allowing almost anything to be put through while alternative viewpoints could be demonised.
One of the, to my mind, most egregious examples of this ‘We’re the Government, and therefore what we’re going to do, is unquestionably right and good’ tendency is the Attlee Government’s putting boosters under one of the most destructive programmes of the era, under which, ‘Victorian’ became a term of abuse, thereby allowing much wanton destruction to be perpetuated under that unquestionable word. Cast iron railings had given the ‘Iron Duke’ his nickname, largely because of his use of iron railings; his splendidly unapologetic postal address being, ‘Number one, London’, so cast iron railings, ornate cast iron railings, were targetted for destruction. ‘Don’t you know there’s a War on?’ was the sarcastic response to almost any request, providing an ever-ready excuse for non-compliance, so no one was able to question the need for this wholesale destruction of the townscape – even though this had to be done surreptitiously, when it was found that cast iron railings could not make up for the lack of metal caused by Hitler’s submarines, so barge-loads in cities like London, were taken, after dark, and dumped at sea; elsewhere, quarries and disused mines were the recipients of this largesse…
All right: Clare was obviously an unprogressive Conservative (‘far-right?), unthinking defender of the rural way of life, and the status quo…
Not quite. Read his account of a Badger baiting:
‘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 huge burrow in the ferns and brakes.
With nose on ground he runs a awkward pace
And anything will beat him in the race.
That ‘a awkward pace’ has all the force of our oft misquoted bit of Dickens’ Mr Bumble: “then the Law, Sir , is a Ass, a Idiot” – and from decades before Clare.
Was Clare an unreconstructed countryman, ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ type of man? His ‘The Badger’ surely quietly answers this – all the more powerfully because it is so evenly, so objectively put:
‘When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den
And put a sack within the hole and lye
Till the old grunting badger passes bye’
Whereas Ralph Hodgson, far from masking his partiality in The Bells of Heaven’ stridently declares the ‘side’ he’s on, Clare, by quietly, objectively, giving the facts of the situation, makes an almost unarguable case for the awfulness of Badger Baiting. Hodgson might very well, or not have witnessed the ‘old grunting badger’: Clare has. Clare’s is probably’grunting’ from the Tuberculosis that could very well be Bovine in origin, and to which his ‘cackles, groans and dies’ stands further testament. Notice, also, how the odds are stacked against him: :
‘When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the Badger to his den’: Clare ’s ‘host’ there speaks not merely of the vast numerical advantage ‘dogs and men’ have over the one wild animal, but also, since a host is used of a drilled and regimented group of men given state support and encouragement – if only tacit – ‘plausibly deniable’ state approval: an army. Brock, has thus a formidable enemy to confront. The ‘lye’ that accompanies the sack in the hole, could be caustic potash (Na0), or, simply, human urine, whose aroma would sound alarm-bells for most animals – just because it’s our smell, we accept it as, in effect, no smell at all whereas, the smell of, for instance, a tom cat…
Clare understands the character of the Badger (that Augustanism ‘the’universalising it) even Kenneth Grahame in ‘Wind in the Willows’ delineates Badger as a formidable creature, inspiring
awe in the other animals, who defer to his antiquity as much as to his raw strength. So, almost instinctively, Clare reaches for a Northhamptonshire dialect word ‘scrowed’ for the Brock’s stripey muzzle.. Nor is it an accident that Clare reverses our accustomed order in the phrase ‘of dogs and men.’
In some of his lines, Clare consciously models himself on Wordsworth, in some he echoes Burns; alas, neither The Lake District nor Scotland were to provide the ‘launch-pad’ he perhaps hoped might propel his verses inignorably into public interest. Lacking a Lordship, to say nothing of the eclat of Byron’ s notoriety, the romance of Keats’ consumption, and the mysteriousness of ‘the Lake Poets, ‘poor Clare’ and he would, perhaps, have relished the oblique reference to ‘the poor Clares’, had but to stand alone, inexorably alone.
I think, however, that amiable face of the May-bug, had he ever seen it, with its amazing seven-fold antennae to amplify each of the colours of the rainbow? would have endeared the strange, nocturnal creature to him. As an undergraduate, earning to pay off my Battells before the beginning of Michaelmas Term, I worked several seasons at Land’s End, whither swarms of these Maybugs were driven (by some instinctual memory?) blundering into one’s face, ears, hair, being flapped and swiped aside, making it almost impossible to think how terrifying it must have been for these denizens of twilit gloom, when their way was impeded by these vast, unpredictable things, humans!

William Hilton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
© Jethro 2025