Unsurprisingly, John Clare (1793-1864) disliked being called "the peasant-poet", but it was the brand, to borrow modern corporate-speak, that was foisted on him by a literary establishment anxious to discover the English Robert Burns. Burns, though working-class, had raised himself to become his nation's Bard. Clare never attained such status. You may blame the English class system, but the poetry itself also tells us why this is so.
Clare is a poet of nature's network, not the social network. The human populations that teem through his poems - farm-hands, shepherds, Gypsies, children – are close to, almost part of, the land. Clare is a Darwinian (Darwin was a near-contemporary) to the extent that he sees man as one of the branches of the "tree of life". In his observations of insects, birds, animals, weather, plants, he is stunningly precise – at least when he forgets about striving after "poesie's power" and records in his own voice what he sees with his own eye. He doesn't idealise nature.
He is not, however, a detached observer: his creatures are invested with human feelings. Whether it's a "whembling" (overturned) beetle waving its legs in terror, the baited badger fighting his tormentors to his last cackling breath, or the firetail who "pipes her 'tweet-tut' fears the whole day long", Clare's creatures are as richly endowed with emotional and moral attributes as human beings. Clare is a novelist of manners – the manners of the natural world, as well as its cameraman and soundman.
He was also, of course, a kind of protest poet. He railed and lamented at the Enclosures from first-hand experience. The loss of the "right to roam" was not merely a denial of the pleasures of country rambles, but also a measure that brought severe hardship to the smaller agricultural labourers who had relied on access to common land. For Clare, enclosure was also psychological trauma.
What damaged nature, damaged him. More immediately than for Wordsworth, landscape was sentient and articulate, an extension of his being. In the elegiac "To a Fallen Elm", the tree is not merely humanised, but judged to be worth more than many humans: "Friend not inanimate – the stocks and stones/ There are and many cloathed in flesh and bones/ Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred/ Deeper than by the attribute of words."
I've chosen two short poems this week. "The Gipsy Camp" dates from Clare's stay in the asylum in Epping Forest (the period which culminated in his famous great trek back to Northborough). It's an unusual, almost unrhymed, sonnet. Clare is not judgmental about the Gypsies ("pilfering" here simply means gathering food from the hedgerows and fields), though he doesn't romanticise them. "A picture to the place" must, in the context, be ironic. The "sestet" has a brilliant, amusing, sympathetic portrait of the Gypsies' dog. Clare's powers of observation and his compassion are beautifully balanced in this poem. The image of the Gypsy knocking his hands to warm them is possibly picked up from the lovely little "Hoar Frost" poem. This is an earlier piece of writing, its lighter mood conveyed in the skipping anapaestic rhythm. Clare's sensitivity to sound is particularly apparent. "Kop kop," sung by the ploughman to his horses, could be an abbreviation of "Come up, come up". It is certainly a striking use of onomatopoeia, echoing the clop of hooves on frozen ground. After that, there is only the silence of cold, steady labour – until the sun comes out. This inspires brief lark-song (again, the birds seem no less significant than the busy humans) and the ploughman is moved to hum a couple of love songs. Spring is on the way. Biography often concentrates on the tragedy of John Clare, but his work is full of sound and sunlight, vigorous movement, delicious relaxation. During his final asylum years he wrote a short poem called "The Peasant Poet" (perhaps, after all, the title didn't displease him retrospectively). The little self-portrait that concludes it is the one I like to think best captures him. No, he is not a bard, but "A silent man in life's affairs/ A thinker from a Boy/ A Peasant in his daily cares -/ The Poet in his joy."
The Gipsy Camp
The snow falls deep; the Forest lies alone:
The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,
Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;
The Gipsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
Beneath the oak, which breaks away the wind,
And bushes close, with snow like hovel warm:
There stinking mutton roasts upon the coals,
And the half roasted dog squats close and rubs,
Then feels the heat too strong and goes aloof;
He watches well, but none a bit can spare,
And vainly waits the morsel thrown away:
'Tis thus they live – a picture to the place;
A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race.
The Hoar Frost Lodges on Every Tree
The hoar frost lodges on every tree
On the round hay stack and the rushy lea
And the boy ere he fothers behind the stack stands
A stamping his feet and a knocking his hands
The shepherd goes tucking his hook in his arm
And makes the dog bark up the sheep to the farm
The ploughman though noisey goes silently now
And rubs off the ryhme with his arm from the plough
Kop kop to his horses he sings and no more
For winter grins keenly and singing is oer
Save just now and then in the midst of the day
When hoar feathered frost is all melted away
Then larks from the thurrows takes sunshine for spring
And mounts oer his head just a minute to sing
And cleaning his plough at the end of the land
He'll hum lovely Jessey and sweet Peggy Band.
(Note: both texts are from the paperback edition of John Clare: Major Works, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell, Oxford World's Classics, 1984. "The Gipsy Camp" was presumably copied by the editors from a printed edition, which is why, unusually for Clare's poetry, it is fully punctuated.)