Major works Book

The poetry of John Clare crept up on me over a long period of years as I would see and hear a smidge of his work referred to when the generic word Romantic Pastoral poetry was discussed. I started off reading a few of his poems and was hooked in the years when finding a "complete" volume of his poems wasn't that easy, as he wasn't that popular. As if the flood gates opened following his major works being published by Oxford Press came an excellent biography (Jonathan Bate), BBC programmes and other writers taking parts of his life for inspiration in their works both fictional and non fictional;Iain Clair's "Edge of the Orison" and the Booker nominated Adam Fould's "The Quickening Maze". What makes his poetry unique is his witness of a changing beloved landscape from rural idyl to the British Industrial Revolution blight and its consequences to the souls of rural peoples. That he ended his days in an asylum with the accusation that the intensity of his "posy" (as they called it!)or poetry caused the loss of his wits. I defy anyone to read one of his final poems when facing his end in the asylum probably not able to look out on his beloved Northamptonshire pastoral setting, and not feel the ache of one removed from what one truly loves:

I Am
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.