John Clare: Poet of Nature and Personal Life.

John Clare:

Poet of Nature and Personal Life

John Clare was born in 1793 and died at the age of seventy-one in 1864. Clare came from a poor background and left school at the age of twelve to become a farm labourer. He had many jobs in the earlier years of his life as a Potboy, a Ploughboy and a Gardener. When he was about fifteen, Clare fell in love with a woman named Mary Joyce; but her family would not allow them to marry due to his poverty. This upset him, but he later married Martha Turner, he was still very unhappy. In 1837 Clare was admitted to High Beach Asylum in Epping, suffering from delusions. Meanwhile, Mary Joyce died unmarried. In 1841 Clare escaped High Beach and went to live with gypsies. Finally in December 1841, John Clare was committed to St Andrews Asylum in Northampton and remained there for his last 23 years. On the 20th May 1864, John Clare died at Northampton.

In 1820 Clare started to write poems that were descriptive of rural life and scenery. In 1827 he wrote “The Shepards Calendar” with village stories and other poems. Later in 1835 Clare wrote “The Rural Muse”. His first book was successful and was fashionable in London Society for only a short time. The books he later wrote were less successful because the fashion was for higher standards.

John Clare was very much a poet of nature and personal life. Clare wrote most of his poetry during the Romantic Movement, which meant that he had an interest in nature, scenery and “primitive life”. He was also seen as part of the Romantic Movement in art, culture and philosophy. He also depicted emotional matter in an imaginative form. His poems contrast with classicism, with its rules, regulations and mannerism.

The first poem by Clare that we are studying is “The Badger”. This is a relatively long poem with five stanzas and is arranged in sonnets with rhyming couplets. It also has iambic pentameter. The poem is about a badger getting caught by the woodman. It starts off with Clare setting the scene by describing the badger and what he does. At this point in the poem, Clare seems to wander off the point a bit. He then goes on to describe what happens when the woodman and his dogs catch the badger. There is very little punctuation used in this poem. As in the other poems that he wrote, Clare uses capital letters at the beginning of the lines and full stops at the end of each sonnet. Towards the end of the poem, in the fourth stanza, Clare uses the present tense, unlike before, to make the story more real and intense. For example, here is a line from the fourth stanza:

“ He tries to reach the woods a awkward race”

This poem has a strange set out; there are five stanzas, all of them are sonnets, apart from the fourth stanza which only has twelve lines. The forth stanza sounds like the end of the poem, because it describes the end of the chase between the badger, woodman and dogs. Also the last line in the fourth stanza describes the badger dying:

“ And leaves his hold and crackles groans and dies.”

Stanzas one to four are actually telling the story, whereas ...

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“ He tries to reach the woods a awkward race”

“ And leaves his hold and crackles groans and dies.”

Stanzas one to four are actually telling the story, whereas stanza five is tagged on at the end describing the badger’s life and telling us that the badger did nothing wrong and how innocent he was.

The second poem is called “Hares at Play”. This poem is just one sonnet with rhyming couplets and as seen before, Clare uses iambic pentameter. This poem is less of a story and more of a descriptive piece of writing. The poem is about what happens when the maids scare the hares early in the morning. Clare uses personification and some metaphors in this poem. This poem is very much about nature and as we know, Clare was very interested in nature. This is a typical poem of his: descriptive of rural life and scenery.

The next poem is called “Mouse’s Nest”. This is also set out with one sonnet with rhyming couplets. Like the other poems he uses iambic pentameter. This poem is different to the other poems that I am studying because John Clare is writing the poem as if he is in the poem and seeing what he is describing. The poem is about Clare finding a mouse’s nest in a field. This is very much the same as the other poems as it is about nature. The poem is fourteen lines long and on the twelfth line the poem seems to finish.

“The Flood” is the next poem. This poem has sonnets but does not have rhyming couplets; the rhyming scheme is abab, where every other line rhymes. This is very different to the other poems because he is describing his thoughts and feelings. As with the last poem, Clare is involved in the story. It is also different in the way that Clare describes the place in which the poem is set at the beginning of the poem:

“ On Lolham Brigs in wild and lonely mood “

The first line tells you a lot about the poem. Clare tells you exactly how he feels: in a lonely and wild mood, perhaps telling you that the wild mood could turn into wild weather or a wild event. Also Clare tells you that the place is Lolham Brigs, this could be a bridge, and with the title of “The Flood “ you can see the relation of the bridge and the flood. Clare starts off the poem by telling you exactly how he feels and setting the scene. Later on in the first stanza he talks of life and death, telling you that issues of life and death are on his mind:

“One minute – and engulfed – like life in death”

Clare goes on to describe the flood and how it is not worth fighting against it because the waves and the sheer force of the flood is too strong. To the end of the second stanza, he starts to list the things he sees floating down in the flood. He then talks about all these monsters that he sees in the flood as he is standing on the bridge:

“Like water monsters lost each winds and trails”

His use of monsters could be because there are monsters inside his head, making him consider life and death. Whatever is disturbing him and giving him this lonely and wild mood is like monsters inside his head. Clare compares a lot of the debris in the water to people and monsters. Towards the end of the poem there is still more detail on what the flood is doing, but unlike the other lines, the last two lines are rhyming couplets to show you that it is the end of the poem. The last line indicates that he wants to move on in life, as shown in the way he uses the word eternity.

The next poem is a song and is called “I hid my love”. The poems are getting more about himself than nature. This poem is not arranged in sonnets and has rhyming couplets but no iambic pentameter. The poem is about his feelings for a woman, perhaps Mary Joyce. His feelings are so intense for this woman, that everything that he looked at reminded him of her. Everything left a memory of her and he related flowers to her:

“Where’er I saw a wild flower lie

I kissed and bade my love good-bye.”

The poem is set in the summertime when he is looking at all the flowers around him and relating them to her. He expresses his love by seeing it in nature, everything he sees in nature he relates to her. He is trying to hide his love but he cannot because the love is all around him. Nature expresses the love for her so he can not escape the love; it seems to haunt him. He gets worked up at the end because her love is screaming back at him:

“And even silence found a tongue,”

The last poem is “I am”. This poem brings in his personal life and nature. He brings in nature by having a very clear image of the sea. This poem is about Clare and the fact that people are ignoring him. He is saying that he is still alive and living, but no one cares or knows:

“I am-yet what I am, none cares or knows;”

The stanza above, is the first line of the poem; it is quite a strong line and gives you a direct view of what he is thinking. This is quite a strong poem which is quite reflective. The rhyming is different to the other poems because the stanzas are not sonnets; in the last two stanzas, every other line rhymes apart from the last two lines of each stanza, which do rhyme. Everybody seems to have rejected him towards the end of his life and he just feels that no one cares anymore. Clare feels that he needs to get away from it all, so he has nothing to do with other people. Clare even states that he can not tell the real world from the dream world anymore:

“ Into the living sea of waking dreams”

This is also a very strong metaphor and the words “living sea” and “waking dreams” these are contradictions. He brings the image of the sea into the poem:

“ But the vast shipwreck of my life esteems”

By having the word “shipwrecked” it indicates that this life that he does so highly regard is becoming chaotic. He uses the words “vanish” and “nothingness” in the first and second stanzas, which represent the bleakness of his life. The third stanza is an answer to the first and second stanzas.

Clare has a very individualistic style of writing poems. His vocabulary used is quite expressive. He uses dialect and archaic words, which are very expressive and effective. The spelling is also very different in the sense that he spells the words phonetically, and not how they are spelled today. He uses very little punctuation as well, it is almost as if he is careless on how he spells and punctuates his poems. This shows us that in is not the spelling or grammar we should be worried about, but it is what is in the actual poem and the message that he is trying to tell us which we should be concentrating on. Clare also uses quite a lot of metaphorical language in his poems I think that this is really effective the way that you can describe something as something else, one metaphor which I found really expressive was:

“Like toil a resting-lies the fallow plough”

This line was from the poem “Hares at play”. Clare uses a lot of onomatopoeias in his poems because most of them are about nature, and there is quite a lot of onomatopoeia language in nature. The rhyming is quite meaningful in Clare’s poems; most of the rhyming is in sonnets with rhyming couplets. This makes these poems easy to read and it makes them a lot less difficult to understand because of their simplicity. I think that sonnets are very effective in the sense that the stanza is just the right length to contain sufficient amount of information, and as I said, they are very easy to read. Also, sonnets are very regular and traditional. This simple rhyming scheme coincides with the simplicity of the spelling and grammar. The other poems have a different rhyming scheme; for example, “The Flood” has a varied rhyming scheme. Also “I am”, has rhyming couplets in the last two stanzas but not in the first; this could indicate the isolated and loneliness of the first verse and perhaps pick out the fact the first verse is so important.

The themes that Clare uses are not limited. He writes about many things, mainly to do with nature and personal life, but the subjects of his poems, are still very varied. I don’t think that Clare really has a message for his readers, especially not in the poems that I have studied. The development of his poems though is interesting because he starts off by writing about badgers and mice and then he goes on to these in-depth poems about his life. This is interesting in the way that, as his life progressed, it started to collapse around him and as his poems got more descriptive about his life he started to go mental.

I personally like John Clare’s poetry. At first, when reading the nature poems like “The Badger” I thought they were a bit lame and ineffective, but since studying them, I have grown to like them. My favourite poem that I have studied has to be “I am”. This poem is so very meaningful and rich in texture as it were. The poem has so much power and it is very understanding. You could relate to the poem very easily.

The meaning of John Clare’s work today is that he depicted a life as it was at the time and wrote about it but there are certain things that remain unchanged today. For example, country life which to this day has changed very little.