There once were springs, when daisies’ silver studs
Like sheets of snow on every pasture spread;
There once were summers where the crow-flower buds
Like golden sunbeams that sheltered Lubin’s head;
There fallen trees the naked moors bewail,
And scarce a bush is left to the tell the mournful tale.
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.
Enclosures came and every path was stopt.
Each tyrant fix’d his sign where paths were found
To hint a trespass who might cross the ground.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
But who can tell the anguish of his mind,
When reformation’s formidable foes
With civil wars ’gainst nature’s peace combined,
And desolation struck her deadly blows
As curst improvement ’gan his fields inclose;
Oh greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell!
His heart-wrung pains, his unavailing woes
No words can utter, and no tongue can tell,
When ploughs destroy’d the green, when groves of willow fell.
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.
Yon parish-hut, where want is shov’d to die,
He never views them but his tear would start;
He passed not by the doors without a sigh,
And felt for every woe of work-house misery.
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.
She turns from echoes of her younger years
And nips the portion of her snuff with tears.
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.
And often takes his family abroad
On short excursions o’er the fields and plain
Making each object on the road
An insect, spring of grass, or ear of grain;
Endeavoring thus most simply to maintain
That the same power that bids the mite to crawl
That browns the wheat-land in its summer stain,
That power which formed the simple flower withal,
Formed all that lives and grows upon this earthly ball.