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.
As 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 noticeable. 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 in the little cemetery of Helpstone, “with nothing above but the green grass and the eternal vault of heaven.”
PART 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 change 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.”—
And when, my Nosegay, thou shalt die,
And heaven’s flower shall prove thee;
My hopes shall follow to the sky,
And everlasting love thee.
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.