John Clare: Poetry John Clare

Early life

Clare was born in Helpston, 6 miles (10 km) to the north of the city of Peterborough.[4] In his lifetime, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Helpston is now part of the City of Peterborough unitary authority.

Clare became an agricultural labourer while still a child, but attended school in Glinton church until he was 12. In his early adult years, Clare became a potboy in The Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce, but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade them to meet. Later, Clare was a gardener at Burghley House.[5] He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth, Rutland, as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year, he was obliged to accept parish relief.[6] Malnutrition stemming from childhood may have been the main factor behind his five-foot stature and contributed to his poor physical health in later life.

Early poems

Clare had bought a copy of James Thomson's The Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller, Edward Drury, who sent them to his cousin, John Taylor of the Taylor & Hessey firm, which had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. The book was highly praised and the next year his Village Minstrel and Other Poems appeared. "There was no limit to the applause bestowed upon Clare, unanimous in their admiration of a poetical genius coming before them in the humble garb of a farm labourer."[7]

Middle life

On 16 March 1820, Clare married Martha ("Patty") Turner, a milkmaid, in the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Casterton.[8] An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so that Clare gained £45 a year, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned. Soon, however, his income became insufficient and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields, his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle down.

Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours, between a need to write poetry and a need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer and he had bouts of depression, which worsened after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well. In 1832, his friends and London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he only felt more alienated there.

Clare's last work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favourably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but its sales were not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. His alcohol consumption steadily increased along with dissatisfaction with his own identity and more erratic behaviour. A notable instance was his interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock. He was becoming a burden to Patty and his family, and in July 1837, on the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor, Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr Matthew Allen's private asylum High Beach near Loughton, in Epping Forest. Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care.

Clare was reported as being "full of many strange delusions". He believed himself to be a prize fighter and that he had two wives, Patty and Mary. He started to claim he was Lord Byron. Allen wrote about Clare to The Times in 1840:

It is most singular that ever since he came... the moment he gets pen or pencil in hand he begins to write most poetical effusions. Yet he has never been able to obtain in conversation, nor even in writing prose, the appearance of sanity for two minutes or two lines together, and yet there is no indication of insanity in any of his poetry.[9]

Religion

Clare was an Anglican.[10][11] Whatever he may have felt about liturgy and ministry, and however critical an eye he may have cast on parish life, Clare retained and replicated his father's loyalty to the Church of England.[12] He dodged services in his youth and dawdled in the fields during the hours of worship, but he derived much help in later years from members of the clergy. He acknowledged that his father "was brought up in the communion of the Church of England, and I have found no cause to withdraw myself from it." If he found aspects of the established church uncongenial and awkward, he remained prepared to defend it: "Still I reverence the church and do from my soul as much as anyone curse the hand that's lifted to undermine its constitution."[13]

Much of Clare's imagery was drawn from the Old Testament (e.g. "The Peasant Poet"). However, Clare also honours the figure of Christ in poems such as "The Stranger".[14]

Later life

During his early asylum years in High Beach, Essex (1837–1841),[15] Clare re-wrote poems and sonnets by Lord Byron. Child Harold, his version of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, became a lament for past lost love, and Don Juan, A Poem an acerbic, misogynistic, sexualised rant redolent of an ageing dandy. Clare also took credit for Shakespeare's plays, claiming to be him. "I'm John Clare now," the poet told a newspaper editor, "I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly."[16]

In July 1841, Clare absconded from the asylum in Essex and walked some 80 miles (130 km) home, believing he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce, to whom he was convinced he was married.[17] He did not believe her family when they told him she had died accidentally three years earlier in a house fire. He remained free, mostly at home in Northborough, for the five months following, but eventually Patty called the doctors.

Between Christmas and New Year, 1841, Clare was committed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St Andrew's Hospital).[18] On his arrival at the asylum, the accompanying doctor, Fenwick Skrimshire, having treated Clare since 1820,[19] completed the admission papers. Asked, "Was the insanity preceded by any severe or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?" Skrimshire entered: "After years of poetical prosing."[20]

His maintenance at the asylum was paid for by Earl Fitzwilliam, "but at the ordinary rate for poor people".[21] He remained there for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Thomas Octavius Prichard, who encouraged and helped him to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, "I Am".[22] It was in this later poetry that Clare "developed a very distinctive voice, an unmistakable intensity and vibrance, such as the later pictures of Van Gogh" possessed.[1]

John Clare died of a stroke on 20 May 1864, in his 71st year.[21] His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph's churchyard, where he had expressed a wish to be buried.[21]

Remembrance

On Clare's birthday, children at the John Clare School, Helpston's primary, parade through the village and place their "midsummer cushions" around his gravestone, which bears the inscriptions "To the Memory of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and "A Poet is Born not Made".[23]