Chapter 1

Produced by Mark Sherwood, Delphine Lettau and Charles Aldarondo

LIFE AND REMAINS

of

JOHN CLARE

The "Northamptonshire Peasant Poet"

INCLUDING:

LETTERS FROM HIS FRIENDS AND CONTEMPORARIES,

EXTRACTS FROM HIS DIARY,

PROSE FRAGMENTS, OLD BALLADS (COLLECTED BY CLARE).

By J.L.CHERRY

"And he sat him down in a lonely place, And chanted a melody loud and sweet." Tennyson.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY BIRKET FOSTER

DEDICATION

To HIS EXCELLENCY, THE LORD-LIEUTENANT OF IRELAND.

MY LORD:

Among the papers which John Clare, the "Peasant Poet" of our county, left behind him, was one in which he desired that the Editor of his "Remains" should dedicate them "to Earl Spencer, with the Author's last wishes."

That memorandum was written in the year 1825, when the poet was anticipating, to use his own words, a speedy entrance into "the dark porch of eternity, whence none returns to tell the tale of his reception."

These melancholy forebodings were not realized, for although in a few years Clare became dead to the world, he lived on in seclusion to a patriarchal age. Meanwhile the Earl Spencer to whom he desired that his "Remains" should be dedicated passed away, and the title descended first to your lordship's uncle, then to your lordship's father, and lastly to your lordship. But through all these years the Earls Spencer were the steadfast and generous friends of the unhappy Poet, nor did your lordship's bounty cease with his life, but was continued to his widow.

In dedicating this volume to your lordship, as I now do, I am complying with the spirit and almost with the very letter of poor Clare's injunction.

I am, with unfeigned respect,

Your lordship's most obedient servant,

THE EDITOR.

INTRODUCTION

The Editor begs the reader to believe that he under took the compilation of this volume with diffidence and trepidation, lest by any defect of judgment he might do aught to diminish the reputation which John Clare has always enjoyed with the lovers of pastoral poetry. He trusts that the shortcomings of an unskilful workman will be forgotten in admiration of the gems for which he has been required to find a setting.

Shortly after Clare's death his literary "Remains" came into the possession of Mr. Taylor, of Northampton. The MSS included several hundreds of hitherto unpublished poems, more than a thousand letters addressed to Clare by his friends and contemporaries, (among them Charles Lamb, James Montgomery, Bloomfield, Sir Chas. A. Elton, Hood, Cary, Allan Cunningham, Mrs. Emmerson, Lord Radstock, &c), diary, pocket books in which Clare had jotted down passing thoughts and fancies in prose and verse, a small collection of curious "Old Ballads" which he says he wrote down on hearing them sung by his father and mother, and numerous other valuable and interesting documents.

This volume has been compiled mainly from these manuscripts. The contents are divided into five sections, namely:--Life and Letters, Asylum Poems, Miscellaneous Poems, Prose Fragments, Old Ballads.

For much of the information relating to the Poet's earlier years the Editor is indebted to Mr. Martin's "Life of Clare," and the narratives of his youthful struggles and sufferings which appeared in the "Quarterly Review" and other periodicals at the time of the publication of his first volume. From that time the correspondence already mentioned became the basis of the biographical sketch, and was of the greatest value. In the few pages which relate to Clare's residence at Northampton, the Editor was enabled to write principally from personal knowledge.

It is almost incumbent upon him to add, that in several important particulars he dissents from Mr. Martin, but he will not engage in the ungracious task of criticizing a work to which he is under an obligation.

While an inmate of the Northampton County Lunatic Asylum, Clare wrote more than five hundred poems. These were carefully preserved by Mr. W. F. Knight, of Birmingham, a gentleman who for many years held a responsible office in that institution, and was a kind-hearted friend of the unhappy bard. From this pile of manuscripts the Editor has selected those which appear under the title of Asylum Poems. The selection was a pleasing, mournful task. Again and again it happened that a poem would open with a bright, musical stanza giving promise of a finished work not unworthy of Clare's genius at its best. This would be followed by others in which, to quote a line from the "Village Minstrel," were "Half-vacant thoughts and rhymes of careless form." Then came deeper obscurity, and at last incoherent nonsense. Of those which are printed, scarcely one was found in a state in which it could be submitted to the public without more or less of revision and correction.

The Miscellaneous Poems are chiefly fugitive pieces collected from magazines and annuals. One or two, referred to in the correspondence with James Montgomery, have been reprinted from the "Rural Muse," and there are a few which, like the Asylum Poems, have not been published before. "Maying; or, Love and Flowers," to which the Editor presumes specially to direct attention, is one of these.

The Prose Fragments are of minor literary importance, but they help to a knowledge and an understanding of the man. The Old Ballads have an interest of their own, apart from their association with Clare. The majority are no doubt what they purport to be, but in two or three instances Clare's hand is discernible.

J. L. C.

Havelock-place, Hanley,

December, 1872.

CONTENTS

LIFE, LETTERS, ETC.

ASYLUM POEMS:

'T is Spring, My Love, 't is Spring Love of Nature The Invitation To the Lark Graves of Infants Bonny Lassie O! Phoebe of the Scottish Glen Maid of the Wilderness Mary Bateman When Shall We Meet Again? The Lover's Invitation Nature's Darling I'll Dream Upon the Days to Come To Isobel The Shepherd's Daughter Lassie, I Love Thee The Gipsy Lass At the Foot of Clifford Hill To My Wife--A Valentine My True Love is a Sailor The Sailor's Return Birds, Why Are Ye Silent? Meet Me Tonight Young Jenny Adieu My Bonny Alice and Her Pitcher The Maiden I Love To Jenny Lind Little Trotty Wagtail The Forest Maid Bonnny Mary O! Love's Emblem The Morning Walk To Miss C.... I Pluck Summer Blossoms The March Nosegay Left Alone To Mary The Nightingale The Dying Child Mary Clock-a Clay Spring Evening The Swallow Jockey and Jenny The Face I Love So Dearly The Beanfield Where She Told Her Love Milking O' the Kye A Lover's Vows The Fall of the Year Autumn Early Love Evening A Valentine To Liberty Approach of Winter Mary Dove Spring's Nosegay The Lost One The Tell-Tale Flowers The Skylark Poets Love Nature--A Fragment Home Yearnings My Schoolboy Days Love Lives Beyond the Tomb My Early Home Mary Appleby Among the Green Bushes To Jane The Old Year

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS:

Maying; or, A Love of Flowers Two Sonnets to Mary The Vanities of Life March The Old Man's Lament Spring Flowers Poem on Death The Wanton Chloe The Old Shepherd To a Rosebud in Humble Life The Triumphs of Time To John Milton The Birds and St. Valentine Farewell and Defiance to Love The Gipsy's Song Peggy Band To a Brook

PROSE FRAGMENTS:

A Confession of Faith Essay on Popularity Scraps for an Essay on Criticism and Fashion Scraps for an Essay on Criticism

OLD SONGS AND BALLADS:

Adieu to My False Love Forever O Silly Love! O Cunning Love! Nobody Cometh to Woo Fare Thee Well Mary Neele Love Scorned By Pride Betrayed The Maiden's Welcome The False Knight's Tragedy Love's Riddle The Banks of Ivory

GLOSSARY

Bedlam cowslip: the paigle, or larger kind of cowslip. Bents: tall, coarse, rushy stems of grass. Blea: high, exposed. Bleb: a bubble, a small drop. Clock-a-clay: the ladybird. Daffies: daffodils. Dithering: trembling, shivering. Hing: preterite of hang. Ladysmock: the cardamine pratensis. Pink: the chaffinch. Pooty: the girdled snail shell. Ramping: coarse and large. Rawky: misty, foggy. Rig: the ridge of a roof. Sueing: a murmuring, melancholy sound. Swaly: wasteful. Sweltered: over-heated by the sun. Twitchy: made of twitch grass. Water-Hob: the marsh marigold.

LIFE, LETTERS, ETC.

HELPSTONE

John Clare, son of Parker and Ann Clare, commonly called "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet," was born at Helpstone, near Peterborough, on the 13th of July, 1793. The lowliness of his lot lends some countenance to the saying of "Melancholy" Burton, that "poverty is the Muses' patrimony." He was the elder of twins, and was so small an infant that his mother used to say of him that "John might have been put into a pint pot." Privation and toil disabled his father at a comparatively early age, and he became a pauper, receiving from the parish an allowance of five shillings a week. His mother was of feeble constitution and was afflicted with dropsy. Clare inherited the low vitality of his parents, and until he reached middle age was subject to depressing ailments which more than once threatened his life, but after that time the failure of his mental powers caused him to be placed in circumstances favourable to bodily health, and in his old age he presented the outward aspect of a sturdy yeoman.

Having endowed Clare with high poetic sensibility, Nature capriciously placed him amid scenes but little calculated to call forth rapturous praises of her charms. "Helpstone," wrote an old friend of the poet, lately deceased, "lies between six and seven miles NNW of Peterborough, on the Syston and Peterborough branch of the Midland Railway, the station being about half a mile from the town. A not unpicturesque country lies about it, though its beauty is somewhat of the Dutch character; far-stretching distances, level meadows, intersected with grey willows and sedgy dikes, frequent spires, substantial watermills, and farm houses of white stone, and cottages of white stone also. Southward, a belt of wood, with a gentle rise beyond, redeems it from absolute flatness. Entering the town by the road from the east you come to a cross, standing in the midst of four ways. Before you, and to the left, stretches the town, consisting of wide streets or roadways, with irregular buildings on either side, interspersed with gardens now lovely with profuse blooms of laburnum and lilac."

The cottage in which John Clare was born is in the main street running south. The views of it which illustrate his poems are not very accurate. They represent it as standing alone, when it is in fact, and evidently always has been, a cluster of two if not of three tenements. There are three occupations now. It is on the west side of the street, and is thatched. In the illustration to the second volume of "The Village Minstrel" (1821), an open stream runs before the door which is crossed by a plank. Modern sanitary regulations have done away with this, if it ever existed and was not a fancy of the artist.

LOCAL ATTACHMENTS

Clare, whose local attachments were intense, bewails in indignant verse the demolition of the Green:--

Ye injur'd fields, ye once were gay, When Nature's hand displayed Long waving rows of willows grey And clumps of hawthorn shade; But now, alas! your hawthorn bowers All desolate we see! The spoiler's axe their shade devours, And cuts down every tree.

Not trees alone have owned their force, Whole woods beneath them bowed, They turned the winding rivulet's course, And all thy pastures plough'd.

Clare also wrote in the "Village Minstrel" in the following candid and artless strain, "a sort of defiant parody on the Highland poets", of the natural features of his native place:--

Swamps of wild rush-beds and sloughs' squashy traces, Grounds of rough fallows with thistle and weed. Flats and low valleys of kingcups and daisies, Sweetest of subjects are ye for my reed: Ye commons left free in the rude rags of nature, Ye brown heaths beclothed in furze as ye be, My wild eye in rapture adores every feature, Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me.

O native endearments! I would not forsake ye, I would not forsake ye for sweetest of scenes: For sweetest of gardens that Nature could make me I would not forsake ye, dear valleys and greens: Though Nature ne'er dropped ye a cloud-resting mountain, Nor waterfalls tumble their music so free, Had Nature denied ye a bush, tree, or fountain, Ye still had been loved as an Eden by me.

And long, my dear valleys, long, long may ye flourish, Though rush-beds and thistles make most of your pride! May showers never fail the green's daisies to nourish, Nor suns dry the fountain that rills by its side! Your skies may be gloomy, and misty your mornings, Your flat swampy valleys unwholesome may be, Still, refuse of Nature, without her adornings Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me.

That the poet's attachment to his native place was deeprooted and unaffected was proved by the difficulty which he found in tearing himself from it in after years, and it is more than probable that the violence which, for the sake of others, he then did to his sensitive nature aggravated his constitutional melancholy and contributed to the ultimate overthrow of his reason.

GRANNY BAINS

Clare's opportunities for learning the elements of knowledge were in keeping with his humble station. Parker Clare, out of his miserable and fluctuating earnings as a day labourer, paid for his child's schooling until he was seven years of age, when he was set to watch sheep and geese on the village heath. Here he made the acquaintance of "Granny Bains," of whom Mr. Martin, quoting, doubtless, from Clare's manuscript autobiography, says:--

"Having spent almost her whole life out of doors, in heat and cold, storm and rain, she had come to be intimately acquainted with all the signs of foreboding change of weather, and was looked upon by her acquaintances as a perfect oracle. She had also a most retentive memory, and being of a joyous nature, with a bodily frame that never knew illness, had learnt every verse or melody that was sung within her hearing, until her mind became a very storehouse of songs. To John, old Granny Bains soon took a great liking, he being a devout listener, ready to sit at her feet for hours and hours while she was warbling her little ditties, alternately merry and plaintive. But though often disturbed in the enjoyment of these delightful recitations, they nevertheless sank deep into John Clare's mind, until he found himself repeating all day long the songs he had heard, and even in his dreams kept humming:--

There sat two ravens upon a tree, Heigh down, derry O! There sat two ravens upon a tree, As deep in love as he and she.

It was thus that the admiration of poetry first awoke in Parker Clare's son, roused by the songs of Granny Bains, the cowherd of Helpstone."

SUMMER LABOURS, WINTER STUDY

From watching cows and geese, the boy was in due course promoted to the rank of team-leader, and was also set to assist his father in the threshing barn. "John," his father used to say, "was weak but willing," and the good man made his son a flail proportioned to his strength. Exposure in the ill-drained fields round Helpstone brought on an attack of tertiary ague, from which the boy had scarcely rallied when he was again sent into the fields. Favourable weather having set in, he recovered his health, and was able that summer to make occasionally a few pence by working overtime. These savings were religiously devoted to schooling, and in the following winter, he being then in his tenth year, he attended an evening school at the neighbouring village of Glinton. John soon became a favourite of the master, Mr. James Merrishaw, and was allowed the run of his little library. His passion for learning rapidly developed itself, and he eagerly devoured every book that came in his way, his reading ranging from "Robinson Crusoe" to "Bonnycastle's Arithmetic" and "Ward's Algebra." He refers to this in later life when he thus speaks of the "Village Minstrel":--

And oft, with books, spare hours he would beguile, And blunder oft with joy round Crusoe's lonely isle.

John pursued his studies for two or three winters under the guidance of the good-natured Merrishaw, and at the end of that time an unsuccessful effort was made to obtain for him a situation as clerk in the office of a solicitor at Wisbeach. After this failure he returned contentedly to the fields, and about this time found a new friend in the son of a small farmer named Turnill. The two youths read together, Turnill assisting Clare with books and writing materials. He now began to "snatch a fearful joy" by scribbling on scraps of paper his unpolished rhymes. "When he was fourteen or fifteen," to use his mother's own words, "he would show me a piece of paper, printed sometimes on one side and scrawled all over on the other, and he would say, 'Mother, this is worth silver and gold,' and I used to say to him, 'Ay, boy, it looks as if it wur,' but I thought he was only wasting his time." John deposited a bundle of these fragments in a chink in the cottage wall, whence "they were duly and daily subtracted by his mother to boil the morning's kettle," but we do not find that he was greatly disturbed by the loss, for being sympathetically asked on one occasion whether he had not kept copies of his earliest poems he replied that he had not, and that they were very likely good for nothing.

While he was yet in his early youth an important and, in some respects, a favourable change took place in the nature of his daily occupation. Among the few well-to-do inhabitants of Helpstone was a person named Francis Gregory, who owned a small public-house, under the sign of the Blue Bell, and rented besides a few acres of land. Francis Gregory, a most kind and amiable man, was unmarried, and kept house with his old mother, a female servant, and a lad, the latter half groom and half gardener. This situation, a yearly hiring, being vacant, it was offered to John, and eagerly accepted, on the understanding that he should have sufficient time of his own to continue his studies. It was a promise abundantly kept, for John Clare had never more leisure, and perhaps was never happier in his life than during the year that he stayed at the Blue Bell. Mr. Francis Gregory, suffering under constant illness, treated the pale little boy, who was always hanging over his books, more like a son than a servant, and this feeling was fully shared by Mr. Gregory's mother. John's chief labours were to attend to a horse and a couple of cows, and occasionally to do some light work in the garden or the potato field; and as these occupations seldom filled more than part of the day or the week, he had all the rest of the time to himself. A characteristic part of Clare's nature began to reveal itself now. While he had little leisure to himself, and much hard work, he was not averse to the society of friends and companions either, as in the case of Turnill, for study, or, as with others, for recreation; but as soon as he found himself to a certain extent his own master he forsook the company of his former acquaintances, and began to lead a sort of hermit's life. He took long strolls into the woods, along the meres, and to other lonely places, and got into the habit of remaining whole hours at some favourite spot, lying flat on the ground with his face towards the sky. "The flickering shadows of the sun, the rustling of the leaves on the trees, the sailing of the fitful clouds over the horizon, and the golden blaze of the sun at morn and eventide were to him spectacles of which his eye never tired, with which his heart never got satiated." (Martin.)

HIS EARLIEST RHYMES

The age at which Clare's poetic fancies first wrought themselves into verse cannot be definitely fixed. We know from his steadfast friend and first editor, the late Mr. John Taylor, publisher to the London University, that his fondness for poetry found expression before even he had learnt to read. He was tired one day with looking at the pictures in a volume of poems, which he used to say he thought was Pomfret's, when his father read him one piece in the book to amuse him. This thrilled him with a delight of which he often afterwards spoke, but though he distinctly recollected the vivid pleasure which the recital gave him he could never recall either the incidents or the language. It may almost be taken for granted that so soon as Clare could write he began to rhyme. The Editor of this volume has before him the book in which the boy set down his arithmetical and geometrical exercises while a pupil of Mr. Merrishaw, and in this book are scribbled in pencil a few undecipherable lines commencing, "Good morning to ye, ballad-singing thrush." He was thirteen years old when an incident occurred which gave a powerful impulse to his dawning genius. A companion had shown him Thomson's "Seasons," and he was seized with an irrepressible desire to possess a copy. He ascertained that the book might be bought at Stamford for eighteenpence, and he entreated his father to give him the money. The poor man pleaded all too truthfully his poverty, but his mother, by great exertions, contrived to scrape together sevenpence, and the deficiency was made up by loans from friends in the village. Next Sunday, John rose long before the dawn and walked to Stamford, a distance of seven miles, to buy a copy of the "Seasons," ignorant or forgetful of the fact that business was suspended on that day. After waiting for three or four hours before the shop to which he had been directed, he learnt from a passer-by that it would not be re-opened until the following morning, and he returned to Helpstone with a heavy heart. Next day he repeated his journey and bore off the much-coveted volume in triumph. He read as he walked back to Helpstone, but meeting with many interruptions clambered over the wall surrounding Burghley Park, and throwing himself on the grass read the volume through twice over before rising. It was a fine spring morning, and under the influence of the poems, the singing of birds, and the bright sunshine, he composed "The Morning Walk." This was soon followed by "The Evening Walk," and some other minor pieces.

At the age of sixteen, if we may trust the account given by his early friend Mr. Octavius Gilchrist, in the "London Magazine" for January, 1820, Clare composed the following sonnet "To a Primrose":--

Welcome, pale primrose, starting up between Dead matted leaves of oak and ash, that strew The every lawn, the wood, and spinney through, 'Mid creeping moss and ivy's darker green! How much thy presence beautifies the ground! How sweet thy modest, unaffected pride Glows on the sunny bank and wood's warm side! And where thy fairy flowers in groups are found The schoolboy roams enchantedly along, Plucking the fairest with a rude delight, While the meek shepherd stops his simple song, To gaze a moment on the pleasing sight, O'erjoyed to see the flowers that truly bring The welcome news of sweet returning Spring.