Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

by Mildred M. Coen

No other poet has such a collection of insects and animals.

The little gay moth lovely to view
A-dancing with lily-white wings in the dew;
He whisked o’er the water-edge flirting and airy
And perched on the down-headed grass like a fairy.
And there came the snail from shell peeping out,
As cautious and fearful as thieves in the rout.
The sly jumping frog, too, had ventured to ramp,
And the glow-worm had just ’gun to light up his lamp.

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.—

He strives to join his fellows in the field,
Till long-contending nature droops at last.
Declining health rejects the poor repast.
His cheerless spouse the coming anger sees,
And mutual murmurs urge the slow disease.

However 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:

And meadows, they are mad with noise
Of laughing maids and shouting boys,
Making up the withering hay
With merry hearts as light as play.

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.

Whenever I must along the Plain,
And mark where once they grew,
Remembrance wakes her busy train,
And brings past scenes to view.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
The green’s gone, too—ah, lovely scene!
No more the kingcup gay
Shall shine in yellow o’er the green.
And shed its golden ray;
No more the herdsman’s early call
Shall bring the cows to feed;
No more the milk-maid’s evening brawl
In “Come Mull” tones succeed.

Both milk-maid’s shouts and herdsman’s call
Have vanished from the green;
The kingcup’s yellow, shade and all,
Shall never more be seen;
But the thick-cultur’d tribe that grow
Will so efface the scene,
That aftertime will hardly know
It ever was a green.

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.—