Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare, by Mildred M. Coen

Transcribed from the 1922 University of Illinois edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

COUNTRY LIFE IN THE POETRY OF JOHN CLARE

p. iiUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

p. iiiTable of Contents

p. 1PART I
Economic Conditions in the Time of Clare

About forty years before the birth of the Poet Clare, (1793) there began in England a land revolution which by the end of the eighteenth century pauperized a great part of the rural population. Up until 1750 fully half of the land of England was worked in “common”, or in accordance with what was known as the open field system. This open field system means that there were special fields set aside for plow land. These fields were divided into very small strips which were alternately cultivated and left unplowed. Besides this plow land, there was a definite area of grazing land, known as the commons. With the coming of enclosures this open field system was abolished. (By the term ‘enclosure’ is meant that all the strips of any one man scattered throughout the holdings of the village were given to him in equivalent in a single, consolidated acreage, which he had to fence, ditch, etc. Or again, the term applies to a large district, as very frequently the commons, that was fenced in for the wealthy landowner’s sheep-pens.)

An enclosure began with a private bill introduced into Parliament—often by a wealthy landlord. This bill, showing the advantages of enclosing, was sent to a committee, whose leader or chairman might have been the selfsame landlord who had proposed the bill. After being considered and passed p. 2upon by the house of lords, which was in turn composed of wealthy landowners only, the bill was put into the hands of a commission to be executed. Such a commission, perhaps headed by the nobleman wanting the enclosure, descended upon the district and distributed the land according to their wishes.

Enclosures no doubt increased the national wealth immensely in the long run. Of course, no modern system of farming could survive in which an acre was divided into ten or more strips each with a different crop and different owner. And modern methods were just then being introduced into England, and were finding an obstacle in the old system that was almost identical with the Anglo-Saxon system of a thousand years earlier. But the change was too rapid and altered the character of the national life of England to such a degree that it wrought untold hardships for more than half a century. The people of the villages were robbed of the barest means of making a living. Just as today the small manufacture has no chance against the big one in his line, so then the small landowner could not compete against the wealthy ones, especially since new and expensive machinery and fertilizers were becoming more and more essential. The wealthy landowners improved their estates so that they might raise the rent and make a profit that could be compared to the profit made by the fast-rising merchant aristocracy. The rent on these improved farms was so high that the small farmer had to give up farming altogether. The commons were enclosed and in a majority of the cases went to p. 3the wealthy landowners who raised a better grade of sheep with heavier wool on the pasturage thus afforded: but the small farmer and in fact all the rest of the agricultural population did not have a place to graze a cow. The small sum of money given them for the loss of their rights in grazing stock on the commons and gathering wood from the waste, was soon spent for the bare necessities of living; and when this was spent, the economic independence of the laboring population was gone.

The enclosures were thus fatal to three classes of the rural population: the small farmer, who had at most thirty acres; the cotter or cottager, who had perhaps five; and the laborer who had less than that or none. The process of enclosing their allottments after the consolidation mentioned, was so expensive that it could not be borne except by a man with some capital to start on. The man who was called upon by the enclosing committee to promptly ditch and fence his little land, and who could not do so, was compelled to sell at whatever price he could get. The small farmer of thirty acres might possibly have borne this expense but he received no adequate recompense for his rights of common; and such advantages as he received from the consolidation of his thirty acres could not make amends for the loss of common rights. For, without pasture he could not keep sheep; with no sheep he could not fertilize his land; without fertilizer the land soon wore out. The small farmer then could emigrate to America, or go to an industrial town, or become a day laborer. Thus it was that a small, independent farmer in a p. 4few years became a laborer and in another few years was perhaps thrown upon parish relief.

The effect upon the cottager can best be described by saying that before the enclosures he was a laborer with land; and after the enclosure he was a laborer without land. For the inability to fence and ditch his holdings operated even more sternly in his case than in that of the small farmer. A great part of the land, moreover, that was enclosed was turned to pasture by the large owners, and the laborers formerly employed on it were discharged. Where fifteen men farmed, one man herded. The cottager and the laborer were thus made dependent on wages alone at a time when competition for work was beating wages down to a starvation level. The squatter was a poor alien on the land. He settled on the waste, built a cottage, and got together a few geese, perhaps a cow and a horse; and began to cultivate the land. With the coming of the enclosure he lost his common right; and thus uprooted he could start on a wandering journey of beggary.

Perhaps we can get an idea of the misery and universal wretchedness of the rural population if we quote a few words from an eye-witness, Cobbett, in his Parish Register:

The laborer, to keep from starving, often turned to poaching and petty thievery. But the noblemen had their parks enclosed against trespassers. Spring-guns were set up on the estates. Poaching offenses were made punishable by death, or at the least by transportation to Australia. The poor might seek charity from the parish pauper work-house. Or they might starve.

Many reforms to better these conditions were proposed, mainly because the English Aristocracy had just seen in a sister nation what a desperate proletariat could do if pushed to extremes of misery. The reform that was adopted goes under the name of The Speenhamland System. In brief, it provided that if a laborer did not receive a certain minimum wage (which was set on a sliding scale to correspond to the price of wheat), he was to be given from the parish relief to make up the set amount. Nothing was done to force the employer to pay this minimum wage; and since he could depend upon the parish having to pay it, he seldom did give the laborer a living wage. The result was that those who were not already paupers speedily became so. The scheme was the culmination of a series of strokes that pauperized an already impoverished nation.

The laborer was separated from the land by the enclosures in a greater degree than can be readily realized. Before the industrial and agrarian revolutions, Arthur Young estimated that out of a population of 8,500,000, the agricultural portion was 2,800,000, or one-fourth of the total number. In the p. 6second decade of the nineteenth century the total number engaged of farms and dairies was 1,300,000: that is not half the actual number engaged in the century before; while the proportion had sunk from one person in four to one in twenty-five.

The main features of this land change were; the open field system was abolished; the plow and grazing lands were enclosed; small farms were consolidated into larger ones; new methods and machinery were introduced; and the laborer was separated from the land. It was in this change of rural conditions that the poet John Clare was born and reared—in Northamptonshire, which was a purely agricultural district and felt the misery and universal pauperization that went with the agrarian revolution.

p. 7PART II
The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)

John Clare was horn in the little village of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, in 1793. His family, one of the poorest in the village, was enrolled in the parish pauper list. When the poet was seven, his father by the greatest privations sent him to a certain “Dame-School”; but the money could not be spared to keep him there very long, and John was hired out to tend the geese and sheep on the commons. He saved up his few pennies during the next two or three years; and again, at the age of ten, went to school for a few months. This was all the formal education that the poet received; for at twelve he was already working regularly in the fields. With hardly strength enough for the slightest labor, so small and weak-armed that his father made him a special flail to thresh with, he must have endured sufferings of body and spirit those years.

When he was thirteen, the reading of Thomson’s “Seasons” led him to believe that he was a poet himself. He had already showed a poetic temperament: as a very young child he had set out one day to walk towards the horizon, that he might touch it. As he grew older he was unusually credulous of supernatural things, fancying all kinds of ghosts and goblins in the swamps ready to attack him. Then, when he read the “Seasons”, he scribbled down on a piece of paper the lines which were afterwards known as “The p. 8Morning Walk.” He wrote other verses on scraps of paper which he would stuff into a hole in the wall. When his mother would find them, she used them for lighting the fires. The poet showed some of his verses to a Mr. Thomas Porter living near Helpstone, and was advised to learn grammar. The attempt to do this kept him from writing any more poems for several years.

During these years, Clare engaged in various forms of day labor to support himself. For a time he worked among the gardeners in Burghley Park, where he acquired the habit of carousing and drinking. He ran away for a few months but after wandering about, went back home to work on a farm. Later he found work at a lime-kiln; where, though the work was hard, he found time to write half a dozen poems in the course of a day. It was at this time, in 1817, that he met Martha Turner, the “Patty” of some of his poems, whom he married after many hesitations and differences.

Between the meeting with Patty and his marriage, three years later, Clare became almost a beggar, and put down his name, as his father did, on the pauper list, claiming relief from the parish. The money he had saved when he worked at the line-kiln had been spent on the printing of a hundred copies of a prospectus, which he called: “Proposals for Publishing by Subscriptions a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Subjects, Religious and Moral, in Verse, by John Clare of Helpstone.” He intended to raise money on this subscription and get married. As the title might indicate, only seven subscribers p. 9could be found; and it seemed as if the poems would never be printed. But by good luck they fell into the hands of a Stamford bookseller called Drury, who sent them to London to his relative, Mr. Taylor, a prominent printer. Taylor saw the value of the poems, and announced them in the first issue of his new “London Magazine”. On January 16, 1820, he published the “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire Peasant.” He attached an introduction that was almost an appeal to charity.

The success of the poems was immediate. Praise came from the Quarterly Review that had attacked Keats. Madame Vestris recited some of the poems at Covent Gardens; Rossini set one of them to music. The poet was taken to London under the guidance of his editor, Mr. Taylor, who took him to theatres and dinner parties. There, because of his naive rusticity in dress, manner, and speech, he became as popular as his rural verses. At his first visit, he gained the friendship of two life-long friends, Lord Radstock and Mrs. Emmerson. Subscriptions were raised; the money was invested for him; and Clare found himself with an income of forty-five pounds a year.

On that amount the poet thought he could live without working. In the day he would wander about the commons writing poems; at night he sat in the inn-parlors receiving his admirers. In 1821 he brought out another book, “The Village Minstrel.” Gilchrist and Taylor p. 10had fought the battles of the first volume; but Gilchrist at this time was busily engaged in a literary battle between the editors of Pope and Byron and the Quarterly Review. This second volume of Clare’s was left neglected. The next year he made a second trip to London. The poet stayed there long enough to get acquainted with the taverns and gay theatres, and to fall in love with an actress and the young wife of a friend. He met Gifford and Murray, and supped with Lamb.

The freedom and gaiety of London had done Clare no good when he came back to Helpstone; the trip had merely made him discontented and lonely. However, he wrote verses copiously and tried to make better bargains in selling them. He was not successful at this, and the little money he had soon dwindled away. Stinting himself in food that his ever increasing family and old parents might have enough to eat, he became seriously ill. He went to London again, and receiving medical aid, became better rapidly.

On this visit, he met all the leading literary men as they gathered for dinner parties at the home of the editor, Taylor. Mr. Martin, Clare’s biographer, gives the poet’s naive reaction to the “Lions” on the times. Like a child he sat spell-bound listening to their talk, while he felt keenly a disappointment that they were not as he had imagined them in his day-dreams. At such parties he met Hazlitt, Reynolds, Coleridge, Lamb, Cary, the translator of Dante, and many others notables.

p. 11As soon as he was strong enough and had returned to Helpstone, he got a job digging ditches and draining marshes; but he was too weak to do the work. Sickness, poverty, cares, came faster and faster. His thoughts naturally came to him in verse; but the circumstances of his life prevented him from developing to the extent he otherwise might. Sometimes his poverty and his cares, sometimes drink, sometimes starvation, prevented him from writing at all. Out under the open sky he felt free. “There was a favorite spot where he delighted to sit, and where the hallowed vein of poetry flowed freely. This spot was the hollow oak on the border of Helpstone heath, called Lea Close Oak. Few human beings ever came to this place; inside this oak the poet used to sit for hours in silent meditations, forgetting everything about him and unmindful of the waning day and the mantle of darkness falling over the earth.” (Martin’s “Life of John Clare.”)

A few years of prosperity relieved the ever-oppressed, poverty-cramped life of the poet. During these few years there was scarcely a wish left unfulfilled, save the one of wanting a strip of earth and to be king of his own land. A poor crop and more sickness brought him back into the dire want of his former years. The Earl Fitzwilliam gave him a few acres of land and a small cottage; but the change from the spot where he had always lived was more than he could bear, and signs of approaching insanity became more p. 12noticeable. The Earl proposed to send him to an asylum, since it was decided that the poet had lost his mind. Mr. Taylor with some interested friends arranged to send him to a private asylum managed by a Dr. Allen, at High Bridge. Homesickness for his wife and children made him run away, after he had been at High Bridge for four years, treated with the utmost kindness. His experiences on this journey, as described afterwards in a letter, were of the most pathetic kind. For ninety hours he had nothing to eat, save a few tobacco crumbs he had found in his pocket and the green grass by the roadside. Dying on the road from hunger, with bruised and bleeding feet, he was picked up on the roadside by his wife. Two county physicians came and signed the certificate that was to shut him up in the Northamptonshire Insane Asylum for the remaining twenty-two years of his life.

At this place Clare was treated with the utmost respect. The officials placed him in a ward with the private patients, paying honor to him as well as to themselves by recognizing the poet in the pauper. In a recess in one of the big windows, he spent the greater part of the years, writing and thinking. When he became very weak and infirm, he was wheeled about in the gardens. On Friday May 20, 1864 he died. The superintendent of the asylum wrote to the Earl Fitzwilliam for the small sum necessary to carry out the wish of the poet that he be buried in his native soil. The Earl refused; but some kind friends raised the sum. Clare now lies under a broad sycamore tree p. 13in the little cemetery of Helpstone, “with nothing above but the green grass and the eternal vault of heaven.”

p. 14PART III
Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

Although John Clare was a peasant suffering from poverty all his life, his poetry was not written with a propagandistic but with an artistic purpose. The literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dealing with country life was either artistic or social in purpose. Ebenezer Elliott, living at the sane time as Clare, wrote poems with a social purpose—for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the lowering of the import duties on raw material. Although Elliott was actually benefitted by the Corn Laws, yet he wrote against them most bitterly. John Clare, on the other hand, impoverished all his life by the Corn Laws and other similar measures, wrote nothing dealing with a change in the agricultural situation. Both writers are to be praised for their honesty, for their ability to detach themselves from immediate personal interests, and for their fidelity to their artistic and social purposes.

The poems of Clare may be divided into three classes: the Love Poems, the Nature Poems, and the Poems dealing with social life. In all the poet’s writings he is dominated by an artistic purpose rather than by a desire to reform or p. 15change conditions. We should expect this to be so in the Love Poems, which form the bulk of his work. Yet, we may learn something of the country life from these poems, if we take them, written by a peasant as they are, to be typical of the sentiments felt by all the rural laborers. In spite of the material hardships and privations, there is a simplicity and sweetness in the peasant’s love, an inner life of tender emotions and warmth of feeling, that is in stark contrast with external hardships. Clare, in the love poems, expresses these sentiments of the peasant. The poem best illustrating the simple love is one entitled, “My Love, thou art a Nosegay Sweet.”—

The ballad entitled “William and Mary,” [15] in which two rural swains are talking of their sweethearts, shows an elevated emotion and respect for the objects of their love, that is deep felt and natural.

And finally, a few lines showing the simplicity of the peasant’s imagery and comparisons.—

Besides the sweet and simple love-life of the peasants, the poet expresses their thoughts about the beauties of nature. Nature must have afforded delights that did much to make up for the poverty of the peasant’s lack of material comfort. Clare expresses these delights of the inarticulate peasants when he describes their sentiments, as well as the beauties of their native scenes.

The poet finds beauty in the common, ordinary, natural objects of the low fen and the marshy country of his birth. But in these scenes he saw only the less gloomy and oppressive aspects. The commons may have been brown and barren, but Clare remembers them when they were green and dotted with wild flowers. He wrote with fancy, feeling, and reflection about these simple objects of nature. In his fancy he lived the life of insects, which to many are simply annoyances, but which to him are fairies, with colored hoods and burnished wings, disguised in a sort of splendid masquerade, rocked to sleep in the smooth velvet of the hedge-rose, or slumbering like princes in the heath’s purple hood, secure from rain, p. 17from dropping dews, in their beds and painted walls. A jolly and royal life this seems, this life of a hand of play-fellows mocking the sunshine with their glittering wings, or drinking golden wine and metheglin from the cup of the honey flower. In a reflective mood, he sees into the eternal mysteries of nature, beneath the forms and symbols of outward appearances. Cowslips of golden blooms will come and go as fresh two thousand years from now as they are today. Brooks, bees, birds, from age to age, these will sing when all the ambitious things of earth have passed away.

There are two characteristics in the nature poems of Clare: truth in the painting of the objects, and tenderness in his sentiments toward them. The poet is both truthful and tender when he paints a bird’s nest, a nest often seen but never disturbed. The nest of the pettichaps, close to the rut-galled wagon-road, so snugly contrived, although without a clump of grass to keep it warm or a shielding thistle spreading its spear in protection, is built like an oven. . . .

The other objects of nature that delighted the peasants, and were poetised by Clare were ants, clover blossoms, and perhaps an early butterfly. Again, we find an intimacy with the furry animals of the commons.—

Thus we can get an idea of the country life from the love poems, which showed the tender emotional love-life of the laborer, in spite of his mental poverty and material hardships. Likewise, in the nature poems, the poet shows the beauties of nature in the country. The peasant delighted in these beauties; he is rich in poetic sentiments and intimate observations, though he is poor—if we judge poverty to be a lack of food and clothing. If the Poet had any resentment of the social and economic situation, we should expect to find it in the poems dealing with Social Life.

Crabbe’s lines in the “Village”, that describe a boy fainting in the fields from exhaustion, are memorable. Such lines might have come aptly from Clare, who as a laborer, fainted from exhaustion and hunger, and often went without food. These lines of Crabbe’s are exactly descriptive of the miseries of the poor, as experienced by Clare himself.—

p. 19However we never find a trace of bitterness in the poems of social life written by Clare. Instead, he describes the hay-making time in this manner:

All his life the poet longed for a spot of ground of his own; but enclosures made this an impossibility. Yet, when Clare wrote about enclosures, it is not about a personal wrong or injustice that he speaks; but about the loss of beauty or of something dear to his heart that had been, but now was gone.

In this same connection, in the “Village Minstrel,” we find these lines lamenting the absence of old scenes and objects of beauty that are gone.—

Although the poet never wrote to reform agricultural conditions, he is often realistic. He even denounces them occasionally, but his prevailing tone is lamentation—for the passing of the meadow-blooms and pasture-flowers—for the trimmed hedge-fences and well-kept lawns.

Clare sees the hut of clay where the widow lives; he sees the poor house, and feels the sting that must be the feeling of the pauper when he accepts charity from the parish.

Neither does the old dame at the parish cottage, as she stands in the door viewing the children play, and remembering her past youth—neither does she escape the poet’s eye.

The poet sees another old woman gathering cress, to make a savory salad for Luxury’s whim. For her labor the old woman will get a penny and a frown. These objects of nature were just as natural for Clare to write about, as the brown leaves falling in the autumn instead of the green leaves coming out in the spring. The dismal as well as the sunny days, the joys as well as the sorrows, he shews in his picture of the country life.

However realistic the poet may be, he is dominated by his artistic purpose; and for this purpose he chose scenes in the country that amused or aroused tender emotions in him. He shunned, perhaps sub-consciously, the things that brought up feelings of there being injustice in the world. His peasants never lack enough food, or some kind of a hut that they call home. In the wood-cutter’s cabin the “careful wife displays her frugal hoard, and both partake in comfort though they are poor.” His country laborer, working on some enclosed farm, is a religious man, not the drunken ignorant peasant who spends his few pennies at some tavern while his wife and children starve. This laborer, Clare depicts going out with his children on a Sunday afternoon.

Clare writes that his purpose is not to lament the sorrows but to show the joys; and we may take the dominant motive of the poet from the following lines:

In accordance with this purpose, in the “Village Minstrel”, his longest poem, he gives us a variegated picture of idyllic country life.

In the Spring the country hums with new life. On his way to plow the fields, the peasant feels the Spring-time in the air; the birds sing merrily as they build their nests; the blue-meadow-daisy peeps farther out from the grass; while the white lambs grazing on the green commons look like the last remnants of the winter’s snow. The milk-maid hums a love song as she weaves a garland to crown the first returning cow. The housewives gossip about the hens and the geese; while on Sunday after church the men talk about the good and the bad signs of the weather for the growing grain.

Then the Spring passes into summer, with its gentle, quiet breezes. A droning insect disturbed by a shrill sound of the hay-maker’s scythe ceases for a moment his course; a butterfly rests on a stalk and is swayed to and fro by the p. 23breeze. The laborer, returning home in the long summer twilight, remembers the ghost stories told the past winter; and as the night comes on he hears the swashing sound of the drowned Amy’s boots. Mid-summer is ushered in with its feast, and every heart is jumping with joy. In brand-new clothes the swain goes to the place of merriment, eager to meet his sun-tanned lass. The woodsman and the thresher, children and kin from the neighboring village, are all present. At the cotter’s house, Joe tunes his fiddle for the dance. When the fiddler is paid, the place is cleared for the merry games that follow the feast.

At night the men go to the ale-house to drink, smoke, and make merry until the money’s all gone.

Autumn, with corn gleanings and merry tales, brings its joy and feasts. As the old women gather the last of the harvest, they get over-heated. Stopping to catch their breath, they amuse the children with stories or Jack the Giant-Killer, Cincerilla, and Thumbs. When the harvest work is done, another feast, known as the Harvest-Supper, follows. p. 24Beer, smoking, and harmless pranks usher out the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Autumn breezes turn into sharper and more stinging blasts; the moors and leas grow bare; the trees are stript of leaves; winter is come. Though sombre and desolate, the peasant delights in watching the storm, as great clouds float faster and faster as the wind drives them before it. The woodsman, returning home on a winter night with a load of fire-wood, looks like a moving snow-bank. The supper is ready stewing on the hook; the children, bright-eyed with happiness, prattle about his knees to welcome him home. After supper with the hearth swept clean, stories, songs, and prayer end the day.

p. 25BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Cunningham, Wm. “Growth of English Industry and Commerce.” 3 vols. 3d. 1907.

FOOTNOTES.

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		PAGE
1. Part I	Economic Conditions in the Time of John Clare	1
2. Part II	The Life of John Clare	7
3. Part III	Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare	14
4. Bibliography		25

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

COUNTRY LIFE IN THE POETRY OF JOHN CLARE

p. iiUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

p. iiiTable of Contents

p. 1PART I
Economic Conditions in the Time of Clare

p. 7PART II
The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)

p. 14PART III
Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

p. 25BIBLIOGRAPHY

FOOTNOTES.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

COUNTRY LIFE IN THE POETRY OF JOHN CLARE

p. iiUNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

p. iiiTable of Contents

p. 1PART I Economic Conditions in the Time of Clare

p. 7PART II The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)

p. 14PART III Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

p. 25BIBLIOGRAPHY

FOOTNOTES.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

p. 1PART I
Economic Conditions in the Time of Clare

p. 7PART II
The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)

p. 14PART III
Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare