Poems Chiefly from Manuscript

by John Clare

3rd. No money is requested until the volume shall be delivered, free of expense, to every subscriber.

4th. The price will not exceed seven shillings and sixpence, and it may not be so much, as the number of pages and the expense of the book will be regulated by the Publisher.

In his new home Clare was for a time troubled with visitors; to most he was aloof, but sometimes he spoke freely of his affairs. One visitor who found him in the communicative mood chanced to be the editor of a magazine, The Alfred. The denials of Clare, frankly given to rumours of his new benefits (variously estimated between two hundred and a thousand a year), were to this gentleman as meat and drink; and The Alfred for October the 5th, 1832, contained a violent manifesto condemning publishers and patrons in the most fiery fashion and apparently inspired by the poet himself. This did his cause much damage, and Clare wrote to the perpetrator in anger: "There never was a more scandalous insult to my feelings than this officious misstatement…. I am no beggar; for my income is £36, and though I have had no final settlement with Taylor, I expect to have one directly." Clare ended by demanding a recantation. None was forthcoming, and the effect on patrons and poet was unfortunate indeed. Yet still he could write of himself in this uncoloured style: "I am ready to laugh with you at my own vanity. For I sit sometimes and wonder over the little noise I have made in the world, until I think I have written nothing yet to deserve any praise at all. So the spirit of fame, of living a little after life like a noise on a conspicuous place, urges my blood upward into unconscious melodies; and striding down my orchard and homestead I hum and sing inwardly these little madrigals, and then go in and pen them down, thinking them much better things than they are—until I look over them again. And then the charm vanishes into the vanity that I shall do something better ere I die; and so, in spite of myself, I rhyme on and write nothing but little things at last."

With the gear that Mrs. Emmerson's kindness and activity had provided, Clare kept his garden and ground in order; yet the winter of 1832 was a time of great hardship and foreboding. His youngest son Charles was born on the 4th of January, 1833; the event shook Clare's nerve more terribly perhaps than anything before had done and he went out into the fields. Late in the day his daughter Anna found him lying unconscious, and for a month he had to keep his bed. As if to prove the proverb "It never rains but it pours," subscribers to his new volume hung back, and when spring had come they numbered in all forty-nine. Clare submitted the work to the publishers, great and small, but the best offer that he got depended on his providing in advance £100 for the necessary steel engravings. And now Clare lost all his delight in lonely walks, but sitting in his study wrote curious paraphrases of "the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the Book of Job." His manner towards those round him became apathetic and silent. Even the news brought by his doctor—who prescribed Clare to his other patients—that subscribers now were more than two hundred, seemed to sound meaningless in his ears. But even these danger-signs seemed discounted by the self-command and cheerfulness which Clare soon afterwards regained; and ashamed of his misjudgment, Dr. Smith came to the conclusion that he need visit Clare no more. An attack of insanity immediately followed, during which Clare did not know his wife, his children or himself.

From this heavy trance he awoke, bitterly aware of his peril. He wrote at once to Taylor, again and again. "You must excuse my writing; but I feel that if I do not write now I shall not be able. What I wish is to get under Dr. Darling's advice, or to have his advice to go somewhere; for I have not been from home this twelve-month, and cannot get anywhere." … "If I could but go to London, I think I should get better. How would you advise me to come? I dare not come up by myself. Do you think one of my children might go with me?… Thank God my wife and children are all well." Taylor wrote once in mildly sympathetic words, but probably thought that Clare was making much ado about nothing. And here at least was the opportunity for a patron to save a poet from death-in-life for five pounds. Nothing was done, and Clare sat in his study, writing more and more paraphrases of the Old Testament, together with series of sonnets of a grotesque, rustic sort, not resembling any other poems in our language.

The "Midsummer Cushion" had been set aside, but Clare had submitted many of the poems together with hundreds more to Messrs. Whittaker. Largely through the recommendations of Mr. Emmerson, the publishers decided to print a volume from these, picking principally those poems which had already shown themselves respectable by appearing in the annuals. One even written in 1820, "The Autumn Robin," was somehow chosen, to the exclusion of such later poems as "Remembrances" and "The Fallen Elm." With faults like these, the selection was nevertheless a distinctly beautiful book of verse. In March, 1834, Clare definitely received forty pounds for the copyright, and finally in July, 1835, appeared this his last book, "The Rural Muse." Its success was half-hearted, in spite of a magnificent eulogy by Christopher North in Blackwood's, and of downright welcome by the Athenaeum, the New Monthly and other good judges. There was a slow sale for several months, but for Clare there was little chance of new remuneration. This he could regard calmly, for while the book was in the press he had received from the Literary Fund a present of fifty pounds.

Clare's malady slowly increased. The exact history of this decline is almost lost, yet we may well believe that the death of his mother on the 18th of December, 1835, was a day of double blackness for him. The winter over, Patty made a great fight for his reason, and at last persuaded him to go out for walks, which checked the decline. Now he became so passionately fond of being out-of-doors that "he could not be made to stop a single day at home." In one of these roving walks he met his old friend Mrs. Marsh, the wife of the Bishop of Peterborough. A few nights later as her guest he sat in the Peterborough theatre watching the "Merchant of Venice." So vivid was his imagination—for doubtless the strolling players were not in themselves convincing—that he at last began to shout at Shylock and try to attack him on the stage. When Clare returned to Helpston, the change in him terrified his wife. And yet, he rallied and walked the fields, and sitting on the window-seat taught his sons to trim the two yew-trees in his garden into old-fashioned circles and cones. The positive signs of derangement which he had given so far were not after all conclusive. He had seen Mary Joyce pass by, he had spoken to her, occasionally he as a third person had watched and discussed the doings of John Clare and this lost sweetheart. He had surprised one or two people by calling mole-hills mountains. One day, too, at Parson Mossop's house he had suddenly pointed to figures moving up and down. Under these circumstances, a Market Deeping doctor named Skrimshaw certified him mad; and on similar grounds almost any one in the world might be clapped into an asylum.

Hallucinations ceased for a few months, but Mrs. Clare had difficulty in keeping outside interference at bay. Earl Fitzwilliam, in his position of landlord, proposed to send the man who called mole-hills mountains at once to the Northampton Asylum. When the summer came, unfortunately, Clare's mind seemed suddenly to give way, and preparations were being made for his admission to the county Asylum when letters came from Taylor and other old friends in London, proposing to place him in private hands. Clare was taken accordingly on the 16th of July, 1837, to Fair Mead House, Highbeach, in Epping Forest.

Dr. Allen, the mild broad-minded founder of this excellent asylum, had few doubts as to the condition of Clare's mind, and assured him an eventual recovery. As with the fifty other patients, so he dealt with Clare: keeping him away from books, and making him work in the garden and the fields. Poetry, it is said, was made impossible for him, paper being taken away from him; but it is not conceivable that Clare could live apart from this kindest of companions for many months together. Soon he was allowed to go out into the forest at his will, often taking his new acquaintance Thomas Campbell, the son of the poet, on these wood-rambles. His hallucinations do not appear to have diminished, although they changed. He was now convinced that Mary Joyce was his true wife—Patty was his "second wife." He had known William Shakespeare, and many other great ones in person. Why such men as Wordsworth, Campbell and Byron were allowed to steal John Clare's best poems and to publish them as their own, he could not imagine. John Clare was not only noble by nature but by blood also.—On such rumoured eccentricities did the popular notion of his madness rest. It would seem that anything he said was taken down in evidence against him. How dared he be figurative?

On the other hand, Miss Mitford records figurative conversations not so easily explained; his eye-witness's account of the execution of Charles the First, "the most graphic and minute, with an accuracy as to costume and manners far exceeding what would probably have been at his command if sane," and his seaman's narrative of the battle of the Nile and the death of Nelson in exact nautical detail. These imaginations she compares to clairvoyance. Cyrus Redding, who left three accounts of his visit, found him "no longer, as he was formerly, attenuated and pale of complexion … a little man, of muscular frame and firmly set, his complexion fresh and forehead high, a nose somewhat aquiline, and long full chin." "His manner was perfectly unembarrassed, his language correct and fluent; he appeared to possess great candour and openness of mind, and much of the temperament of genius. There was about his manner no tincture of rusticity." Once only during the conversation did Clare betray any aberration, abruptly introducing and abandoning the topic of Prize-fighting, as though "a note had got into a piece of music which had no business there."