Dear Romanticists,
We return now to discussing working-class poetry, though this time we will focus on one poet in particular. John Clare is probably the most famous of our period’s self-educated authors. His parents were essentially illiterate and Clare himself had no formal education after the age of 11 when he left school to work full-time as an agricultural laborer.
We return now to discussing working-class poetry, though this time we will focus on one poet in particular. John Clare is probably the most famous of our period’s self-educated authors. His parents were essentially illiterate and Clare himself had no formal education after the age of 11 when he left school to work full-time as an agricultural laborer.
Clare’s everyday life was bound up in the land on which he lived. He was thus poised to become one of the great voices of the Agricultural Revolution, a series of technological advances and land reforms that changed the face of British countryside. Acts of enclosure, for example, re-distributed lands that had been held in common, in some cases since the Middle Ages. Trees and hedges were uprooted, fields plowed up, and marshlands drained. For the first time in living memory, the land that so sharply informed rural identity radically changed.
Much of Clare’s poetry records and responds to the destruction of the land he had known and the corresponding loss of rural cultural that went with it. That is, like all of our Romantic poets, Clare was fixated on the concept of loss. His loss, however, is rooted specifically in specific flora and fauna, agrarian traditions, and a pre-industrial relationship between people and the land they worked. Until Thomas Hardy arrives on the scene at the opposite end of the century, no one will speak with more authority or more agony about the British countryside and the cultural memories and practices that once flourished there.
Much of Clare’s poetry records and responds to the destruction of the land he had known and the corresponding loss of rural cultural that went with it. That is, like all of our Romantic poets, Clare was fixated on the concept of loss. His loss, however, is rooted specifically in specific flora and fauna, agrarian traditions, and a pre-industrial relationship between people and the land they worked. Until Thomas Hardy arrives on the scene at the opposite end of the century, no one will speak with more authority or more agony about the British countryside and the cultural memories and practices that once flourished there.
Read the assigned poems in our anthology; the other two listed on the syllabus can be found here:
Enjoy this work inspired by The Shepherd's Calendar by the contemporary artist from Clare's native Northamptonshire, Peter Newcombe.
I'm probably crazy, but I found a whole bunch in "The Flitting." It hit me hard, unlike any other poem we've read so far. Raw, sizzling pain runs through every line, in simple, unpretentious language. Clare has lost his home; we lose it with him, again and again, in an endless number of little ways.
ReplyDeleteNature is a hallmark of Romantics everywhere, but Clare's earnest connection to the land ripped away from him speaks truest. He is no visitor to the land, he does not sojourn there for a summer of inspiration, or travel over it on a gentleman's travels. He is the land, the land is him.
He speaks of the Bible often - to David and Jerusalem, to Abel, Eve, and Eden. He taps into the centuries old desire for the return to Israel exiled Jews have hoped of: "My heart goes far away to dream." The expulsion from one's land, and the surviving bond is put to words in "The Flitting," words that talk of the longing for those pockets and crannies missed by anyone but a born native.
The world mourns for the loss, the Everest-sized loss. "The sun e'en seems to loose its way / Nor knows the quarter its in."
Clare rejects the insinuations of the modern-day, the intrusion of fallacy. They are distortions of a purity that cannot be destroyed, or essentially harmed in any way, but that are nonetheless aggravating, ridiculous.
"Their memory lingers round the heart / Like life who essence is its friends," and trying to be a part of anything superficial or fake, with the edges of one's heart open and tender is impossible. Even with the hope offered by the weed that will not die, by "the grass eternal springs," the hope of a far off tomorrow, the death of the past, the desolation of the presence is enough to kill you.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the poet comes from the wealthiest of homes or from the poorest-- they all have existential crises.
ReplyDeleteClare’s simple thresher’s vocabulary makes his stand apart from the other Later Romantics we’ve read, yet he still writes in iambic pentametre, and not in the more balladic or other oral traditional forms one would expect of a labour poet. Of course, he did have an education that most others of his status lacked, and he was fascinated with Byron, even going so far as to think that he himself /was/ Byron in the throes of his madness.
And that’s another thing-- Clare was the only one of the poets we’ve seen who actually received “clinical aid” for his mental imbalances. Obviously, mental asylums in those days were hardly effective in curing or really helping their patients much, but I suppose that it shows the advancement of the times and the acknowledgement of mental illness overall.
You can see Clare’s mind slipping, though, in “I am”-- the title itself is heartbreaking. It’s adamant, and self-convincing-- he has to convince himself to believe that he /is/, that he’s alive and writing, and not a “memory lost” like he’s treated, or like a madman or merely a dream. It was written in 1846, so it was still early on in his confinement, and he /remembers/. He is losing sight of what he was and is, exactly, and that is partly because his friends no longer seem to care for him, and imaginings of the lover he never really had come and go. Even his own memories and woes come in throes-- they “rise and vanish in oblivion’s host”, in such a way that they come and go so often that he is unsure as to whether or not even his woes are figments of his imagination. In the last stanza… is he wishing for a fantasy world, or heaven? He wants to reside with his God, but he also just wants to sleep and exist without worries at all, with no delusions, not even emotions at all. He just wants an ending calm, merely to exist in a bubble, because just existing in this state of being, in this world, is too painful for him, in the wreck he sees as his life, and with even that which he holds dear being strange, and probably terrifying in that strangeness, to him.
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ReplyDeleteI like how Clare's poetry mixes cliché lines about love with an accurate description of losing one's mind. "First Love" stood out to me because as I started reading, I thought, Oh, no, not another squishy love poem--for the first four lines. And then the words "deadly pale" and "ail" jumped out at me and waved wildly. I noticed how the poem turns completely away from the "sweet" love of the first lines into a description of illness that may or may not be connected to love.
ReplyDeleteClare was obsessed with Mary Joyce and this is the topic of the poem, on the surface; but this idea is incorporated more to show how his love for her evolved as a symptom of his madness. His madness is the center of the poem, as the descriptions of it are the bulk of the poem and the whole middle stanza.
The descriptions of his emotions allude to death: First he "ails" and then he "turned to clay," the basic biblical material man was created from and decomposes into. His blood behaves strangely, "rush[ing]" and "burnt round my heart." Often the sensation of illness concentrates in the heart, like feelings of nausea or faintness, because those are generic sensations in the body. It reverts the usual source of emotions, the heart, back into a physical pump for blood which keeps the body alive, but in this case makes the body feel sick or as though it's dying. The speaker feels "deadly pale," which I interpret as cold when the blood leaves, and then hot as the blood burns inside him. The language is detailed and corporal here, and then the themes are repeated in abstract terms, as "love's bed" which is warm is correlated with "snow."
In "I Am," I really like the lines "Untroubling and untroubled where I lie; / The grass below above the vaulted sky." Some versions insert punctuation between "below above" but Clare didn't necessarily mean to separate the two words. The speaker is both above and below. To express the mad looseness he feels, the speaker describes the sensation of lying on grass yet feeling as if he is floating above the sky, a topsy-turvy sensation which is should be insane but is highly relatable.