GradeSaver has individual ClassicNotes on many of John Clare's poems, including "The Badger," "First Love," "I Am!," "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb," "The Yellowhammer's Nest," and "Autumn."
The English Romantic poet John Clare is best known for his poetry about the natural world, as well as his subtle and experimental use of language, and his unique interpretations of popular Romantic themes like the sublime and the loss of the self. Born to virtually illiterate field laborers, Clare received only a basic education, and left school to work at the age of 12. Yet he gained a love for poetry at an early age, and began writing his own poetry around the time he left school. He went on to publish four collections of poetry about rural life.
Many Romantic poets wrote about the natural world. However, this work was often focused on extraordinary, awe-inspiring spectacles like the mountains and the ocean. They were largely city dwellers interested in nature’s ability to temporarily free us from the stress of modern, industrial existence. Clare, by contrast, wrote from a perspective of personal knowledge and intimate experience. His work is sometimes described as “pastoral,” because it focuses more on the humble, ordinary details of the countryside than on vast, sublime landscapes, as did the work of his contemporaries. However, unlike other pastoral poets, Clare is not depicting a fantasy of idyllic country life, but rather a clear-eyed depiction of the world in which he grew up.
For example, his poem “The Badger” depicts badger-baiting, a traditional rural practice in which a badger was captured from its den and forced to fight with dogs until it died. Clare’s poem is strangely objective in its stance towards this cruel practice. He positions the badger as the hero of the exchange, but never explicitly condemns the villagers for their actions. Indeed, the poem might tacitly celebrate the strong community bonds and implicit trust that made the badger hunt possible. More than a poem about right and wrong, it is a poem that attempts to preserve the feeling of an unusual and violent practice that was rapidly disappearing from the modern world.
“The Badger” is written in heroic couplets, a traditional poetic form in which a narrative is conveyed through a series of pairs of rhymed lines. In the nineteenth century, the form was already outdated, and most of Clare’s contemporaries used it rarely, or in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner. The young Clare, however, was very inspired by earlier poets: his third book The Shepherd’s Calendar, written in 1827, even borrows its title and subject matter from a work by the sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser.
Despite his willingness to borrow from early poets, Clare also used language in innovative ways. This was especially true as he entered his middle period, capped off by his fourth and final book, The Rural Muse. Clare had always employed an unusual vocabulary influenced by his rural upbringing and lack of formal education. In The Rural Muse, he increasingly employed words for their sound as well as their meaning, attempting to mimic the sounds of the natural world with his own writing. These poems also display a profound reverence for other living things. His poem “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” pays obsessively close attention to the nest of a tiny songbird by the bank of a stream “scarcely deep enough” to drown a bee. The poem invites the reader to share in the speaker’s close attention to this miniature world.
Clare’s later poetry increasingly focused on the nature of the self. Though the natural world still plays an important role, he often speaks of it in more general terms. For example, the famous poem “I Am!” ends by expressing a wish “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.” The grass and the sky are clearly central to Clare’s desire for a deathlike peace, but he eschews describing them in more detail in favor of expressing a feeling of melancholy yearning.
“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is more optimistic, but similarly abstract. In it, Clare defines love as something that is both beyond the world, and found within the world. Rather than looking to romance in his own life, he turns to the dew, the flowers, the grass, and the sky as things whose beauty makes clear the presence of love in the world. As in “I Am!,” Clare’s references to sky and grass are far more generic than his descriptions of the twigs that make up the yellowhammer’s nest or his methodical, detailed account of the badger baiting. Yet his references to them still record a deep relationship between the poet and the natural world, one which persisted throughout his life.
Today, many critics are interested in the environmental stakes of Clare’s poetry. Arguably, the Romantic vision of nature as an escape enables environmental destruction. By creating a strict dichotomy between the grimy, lifeless city and the beauty of an uninhabited natural world, it erases the possibility of a mutually regenerative relationship between human society and the natural world. This attitude towards nature also has colonial roots. Many early British settlers of America admired the beauty of the landscape, but sought to exterminate the Indigenous people who lived in it. By imagining wilderness as a place unimpacted by humans, the Romantics reinforced the erasure of Indigenous land stewardship. Clare’s poetry, grounded in the realities of rural life, is a resonant alternative, in which nature appears as a home as well as a retreat.
However, John Clare was more than a nature poet. He was a major writer about love, writing throughout his life about his love for his childhood crush Mary Joyce. We discuss this aspect of his work in our guides on “First Love” as well as “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb.” He was also a subtle and unorthodox religious thinker, who reinterpreted the standard beliefs of orthodox Christianity in order to find God in the natural world. He similarly reinterpreted many traditional poetic forms, from the sonnet to the heroic couplet, in new and exciting ways. Finally, he is a major figure in the history of colloquial poetry, or poetry that eschews strictly formal speech in favor of reflecting the vocabulary and idiosyncratic speaking styles of a particular community.
