I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.'
This was the last poem which Clare wrote—the last, and, we think, the noblest of all his poems. Clare's swan-song, we fervently hope, will live as long as the English language.
For the last ten or twelve years of his existence the poet suffered much from physical infirmities. Previously he was allowed to go almost daily into the town of Northampton, where he used to sit raider the portico of All Saints' Church, watching the gambols of the children around him, and the fleeting clouds high up in the sky. When these excursions came to be forbidden, he retired to his window-recess in the asylum, reading little and speaking little; dreaming unutterable dreams of another world. Sometimes his face would brighten up as if illuminated by an inward sun, overwhelming in its glory and beauty. This life of contemplation, extending over many years, was followed by a singular change in the physical constitution. The head seemed to expand vastly; the bushy eyebrows grew downward until they almost obscured the eyes, and the abundant hair, white as snow, came to fall in long curls over the massive shoulders. In outward appearance the poet became the patriarch.
The inmates of the asylum treated Clare with the greatest respect—far greater than that previously allotted to him by the world without. To his fellow-sufferers he always was John Clare the poet; never Clare the farm-labourer or the lime-burner. An artist among the patients was indefatigable in painting his portrait, in all possible attitudes; others never wearied of waiting upon him, or rendering him some slight service. The poet accepted the homage thus rendered, quietly and unaffectedly, as a king would that of his subjects. He gave little utterance to his thoughts, or dreams, whatever they were, and only smiled upon his companions now and then. When he became very weak and infirm, they put him into a chair, and wheeled him about in the garden. The last day he was thus taken out, and enjoyed the fresh air and the golden sunshine, was on Good Friday, 1864. He was too helpless to be moved afterwards; yet would still creep, now and then, from his bed to the window, looking down upon the ever-beautiful world, which he knew he was leaving now, and which he was not loth to leave, though he loved it so much.
Towards noon on the 20th of May, the poet closed his eyes for ever. His last words were, 'I want to go home.' So gentle was his end that the bystanders scarcely knew when he had ceased to breathe. God took his soul away without a struggle.
Clare had always expressed a wish to sleep his last sleep in the churchyard of his native village, close to his 'own old home of homes.' In the very first poem of his earliest published book of verses, he summed up all his aspirations in the one that he should—
'As reward for countless troubles past,
Find one hope true: to die at home at last.'
Accordingly, when the poet's spirit had fled, the superintendent of the Northampton asylum wrote to his patron, Earl Fitzwilliam, asking for a grant of the small sum necessary to carry the wish of the deceased into effect. The noble patron replied by a refusal, advising the burial of the poet as a pauper at Northampton.
But this lasting disgrace, fortunately, was not to be. Through the active exertions of some true Christian souls, real friends of poetry, the requisite burial fund was raised in a few days, and the poet's body, having been conveyed to Helpston, was reverently interred there on Wednesday, the 25th of May, 1864. There now lies, under the shade of a sycamore-tree, with nothing above but the green grass and the eternal vault of heaven, all that earth has to keep of John Clare, one of the sweetest singers of nature ever born within the fair realm of dear old England—of dear old England, so proud of its galaxy of noble poets, and so wasteful of their lives.
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