John Clare - A Forgotten Poet

"O fortune keep me in the country air
Let woods lanes fields my spirit still repair
They who for wealth to crowded cities stray
But little know what wealth they throw away."

As Tom Paulin suggests, John Clare's poetry is a poetry of place but also of displacement. The key date in his life is 1832, when he was moved by his patrons from his birthplace of Helpstone to Northborough - a village only a few miles from Helpstone, but nonetheless strange and disturbingly lacking the familiar sights and sounds of his native land. Clare's poetry undergoes a significant change during this period, moving away from the open, radical agricultural dissent poetry of his younger days towards a more claustrophobic world-weary voice. If anything, the poetry itself becomes better the closer Clare descends towards insanity. It is after 1832 that Clare finally realizes that he has lost his battle against enclosure and begins to wrap himself up in his own world, retreating into the nests and burrows of the animals that inhabit his beloved countryside. He begins to use the sonnet form almost exclusively, as if the constraints of writing within a distinct verse form provide protection that he did not need when writing the great long poems such as 'The Lament of Swordy Well'. Similarly, whereas in his early verse he seems to sweep across the countryside, relating all that he saw to his audience, he concentrates far more on individual subjects in his later poetry, losing himself in the "little things" since enclosure has destroyed the openness of the countryside he loved.

In his early poems Clare developed a unique voice of rural dissent. He does this by founding his own revolutionary country in the environs of Helpstone inhabited by his allies: the birds, bees and animals which inhabit this land. He uses local dialect as a way of excluding "they who for wealth to crowded cities stray" and to increase the focus on the local. Clare is defending his 'protected space' (Summerfield) against the intruders. His other allies in this struggle are the people of Helpstone who to him represent the natural order: the milkmaids, shepherds and agricultural workers whose tasks have not been much altered by the march of progress. One of the best early poems expressing Clare's fear of intruders is 'Cottage Fears'. The cottager - the symbol of traditional rural life, is presented as a vulnerable and naïve target, linked implicitly to his chickens which are in danger from marauding foxes. The cottager's vulnerability is highlighted by his lack of protection: only 'yelping curs' protect his chickens from the foxes. By replicating the larger struggle - between the countryside and enclosure - in this microcosm of rural life, Clare manages to construct a touching evocation of rustic life whilst still making a radical comment on the dangers of progress. Unlike the later poetry, the villager ends this poem in safe, if confined comfort: "... [He] locks up the door in haste - nor cares to stir / From the snug safety of his humble shed".

Clare's poetry gives voice to a 'tormented customary consciousness': in his poetry we see the disintegration of a moral economy - an economy which was still held together by a delicate social fabric based and secured by custom, rather than by the vagaries of money and profit: though this 'moral' economy could be as brutal and unequal as anything that came after it. What Clare laments is the replacement of this order by 'new instrumental and exploitative stance, not only towards labour... but also towards the natural world'. This is important because it shows that the experience of people and nature are not fragmented, but intertwined. This intertwining of the experience of people and nature is starkly represented in an image like that of the hanging moles in 'Remembrances' (the image probably alludes to the labourers hung during the Captain Swing riots and rick burnings that exploded across Southern England during 1830).

Enclosure had many detrimental effects upon the rural poor not only in the way that they were dispossessed of ownership, but also of their control of the landscape: they became alienated from their surroundings. The new landscape of 'repression and greed' that enclosure had stamped upon the land is similarly stamped across the structure of 'Remembrances'. One feels the fences and exclusions of the new landscape tightening like a torque around the poem's flowing rhythm; particularly in the last line of each stanza which cuts bitterly across the verse's sprung motion. In 'To a Fallen Elm' the fact that Clare no longer has the right to decide the fate of the Elm overshadowing his house becomes an emblem of the erosion of the right to nature - of the right to shape one's environment. This right has been taken over by a new knavish and empty conception of freedom. Though he sentimentalised the Helpstone of his youth Clare's writing