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                                 POEMS

                                  BY

                              JOHN CLARE




                          PUBLISHER’S NOTICE.


The Publisher desires to express his regret that, owing to an oversight,
the proofs of the Introduction were not submitted to the Editor, who is
in no way responsible for the following

                   ERRATA (corrected in this etext)

Page xvii., line 6, for “been” read “being”; page xxii., first line, for
“Reynerdson” read “Reynardson”; page xxiv., for “tête-á-tête” read
“tête-à-tête”; page xxviii., 2nd line, for “compliments.” read
“compliments,”; page xxx., line 11, for “Dick Suivelles” read “Dick
Swiveller”; page xxxi., in the last line but two, for “to” read “of”;
page xxxix., in line 6 of second paragraph for “widey” read “widely.”




                         POEMS _by_ JOHN CLARE

                      SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY
                       NORMAN GALE (AUTHOR OF “A
                    COUNTRY MUSE,” &C. &C.) WITH A
                    BIBLIOGRAPHY BY C. ERNEST SMITH

                      RUGBY: GEORGE E. OVER, 1901

                      Printed at The Rugby Press




CONTENTS


                                                                    Page

A Spring Morning                                                     138

A World for Love                                                     120

Address to Plenty                                                      3

Approach of Spring, The                                               76

Autumn                                                                99

Autumn Robin, The                                                    132

Ballad                                                                42

Crab Tree, The                                                       139

Decay                                                                125

December                                                              70

Effusion                                                              39

Gipsy Camp, The                                                       45

Graves of Infants                                                    144

Harvest Morning, The                                                  18

Home Yearnings                                                       145

I am! Yet what I am                                                  157

June                                                                  65

Love                                                                 123

Love Lives beyond the Tomb                                           147

Meeting, The                                                          37

Milton, To John                                                      154

My Early Home                                                        149

My Love, thou art a Nosegay Sweet                                     36

Nightingale’s Nest, The                                              114

Noon                                                                  14

Pastoral Fancies                                                     129

Patty                                                                 32

Patty of the Vale                                                     34

Old Poesy                                                            141

On an Infant’s Grave                                                  22

Rural Evening                                                         55

Rustic Fishing                                                        61

Song                                                                  44

Song                                                                 122

Summer Evening                                                        25

Summer Images                                                         89

Tell-Tale Flowers, The                                               150

Thoughts in a Churchyard                                             112

’Tis Spring, my Love, ’Tis Spring                                    142

To an April Daisy                                                     23

To P * * * *                                                         118

To the Clouds                                                         47

To the Rural Muse                                                     82

Universal Epitaph, The                                                17

Vanities of Life, The                                                105

What is Life?                                                          1

Winter                                                               140

Woodman, The                                                          48




BIOGRAPHY AND COMMENT


In tracing the origin of JOHN CLARE it is not necessary to go very far
back, reference to his grandfather and grandmother being a sufficient
acknowledgement of the claims of genealogy. Following the road at
haphazard, trusting himself entirely to the guidance of fortune, and
relying for provender upon his skill in drawing from a violin tunes of
the battle and the dance, about thirty years before Helpstone heard the
first wail of its infant poet, there arrived at the village the vagabond
and truculent Parker. Born under a wandering star, this man had footed
it through many a country of Europe, careless whether daily necessity
required from him an act of bloodshed or the scraping of a harum-scarum
reel designed to set frolic in the toes of man and maid. At the time of
his reaching Helpstone, a Northamptonshire village, destined to come
into prominence because of the lyrics of its chief son, it happened that
the children were without a schoolmaster. In his time the adventurer
had played many parts. Why should he not add to the list? Effrontery,
backed up by an uncertain amount of superficial attainment, won the day,
and this fiddling Odysseus obtained the vacant position. Of his
boastings, his bowings, his drinkings, there is no need to make history,
but his soft tongue demands a moment of attention. We may take it for
granted that he picked out the fairest flower among the maids of
Helpstone as the target for all the darts at his disposal, each of
which, we may be sure, was polished by use. The daughter of the parish
clerk was a fortress easy to capture. Depicted by himself, the rascal
loomed as a hero; till at last the affair proceeded beyond a mere kiss,
and the poor girl pleaded for the offices of a priest in order to save
her child from the stain of illegitimacy. However, the schoolmaster
proved glib of promises, but fleet of foot, for on the day following his
sweetheart’s revelations he was nowhere to be found. In the course of
time JOHN CLARE’S father was born. In his turn, he grew into the want of
a mate, found her, married her, and begot an honour for England.

JOHN CLARE was born at Helpstone, on the 13th day of July, 1793, and
born into a heritage of handicaps. To say nothing of the fruits of
exposure to rough weathers which were ripening in his father’s system,
the boy had the disadvantage of being one of twins, a sister
accompanying him into the world. His mother suffered from dropsy, and we
may well believe that what life the children sucked from her breast
contained elements threatening their future health. Small and frail, the
lad had the additional misfortune to open his eyes in the cottage of a
pauper, instead of in some abode where his natural weakness could have
been nourished by foods giving inward encouragement, and of a sort sure
to result in the building up of hearty fibre. Despite all these early
rebuffs, JOHN CLARE kept hold of life. When still very young he set out
full of faith to explore the junction of earth and heaven, for on the
horizon he could see the point of their meeting. In this incident, as
well as in many another of his childhood, it is easy to detect signs of
a spirit triumphantly unfitted for residence in a clay hovel at
Helpstone. As luck would have it, a kind of rough-and-ready poetry was
not altogether out of the boy’s reach, for his father’s head was stuffed
with innumerable odds-and-ends of rhyme, some of which he was in the
habit of reciting to his son. Entertainment of the same sort was
obtainable from old Granny Bains, a weather-worn cow-herd, to whom the
future poet was attracted by her store of ditties; whose especial
cronies were the wind and rain. Under such illiterate tutors little JOHN
CLARE moved closer and closer to the soul of poetry, musing while he put
a limit to the vagrancy of the geese and sheep for which he had been
appointed guardian as soon as the main part of his schooling was over.
His departure from the scholastic bench took place when his years had
reached a very unripe total, for with only seven birthdays entered in
his book of life, at an age when a child is usually at the commencement
of historical and geographical perplexities, he was turned out into the
fields as a wage-earner. Instead of feeling elated at his escape from
the scholastic coils of Dame Bullimore, as many a lad would have done,
JOHN CLARE, being aware of his budding wits, although unable to
comprehend the motive force from within, looked round his small district
in search of fresh educational territories to be conquered by his brain.
Having saved a few pence he made overtures to Mr. James Merrishaw, the
schoolmaster of Glinton, and in the duller months of the year, when days
were short, he attended certain evening classes, notwithstanding the
fact that the journeys involved taxed his boot-leather severely; for
Glinton is nearly five miles away from Helpstone. Here he learned well,
but not altogether wisely, if we may agree that the boy’s struggles with
the intricacies of algebra were conspicuous for mis-applied energy. But
something more valuable than baffling equations resulted from JOHN
CLARE’S connection with the sage of Glinton, for Mr. Merrishaw made him
free of his books, thus feeding more and more that desire for knowledge
which sprang up in him not less rapidly than a mushroom grows in a
meadow.

Even in such a loose piece of biography as this--an essay which has no
other aim than to glance in passing at the salient features of CLARE’S
career--a little space must be spared for mention of the boy’s year of
service as factotum at the “Blue Bell” at Helpstone, where he had almost
as much leisure as work, because it was here that his hermitical notions
and moods of dream increased at an extraordinary rate. Served by
travelling pedlars, whose packs let him share in fancy the terror of Red
Riding Hood, the adventures of Valentine and Orson, to say no word of
Sinbad’s amazements, the small student entered for the first time into
the recesses of fairy land, there to lave his hands in its abundant
jewels, while making extortionate demands upon the swiftness of genies.
Little by little, algebra went to the wall, yielding as much to the
boy’s spreading passion for Nature’s feast of grass and flowers, as for
the limitless enchantments born of imagination, since at this period the
list of impulses communicated to him by wayside blossoms, by clouds, by
winds, and by the easy ballads of thrushes, daily grew longer. The boy
began to appreciate the largeness of God’s school as compared with the
limits reigned over by Dame Bullimore and the pedagogue of Glinton; and
his increasing sense of hearing enabled him to receive into his
understanding fragments of those sermons which are preached by stones.
Hunger for expansion lived and lusted in his heart. No better example of
this fury of craving could be adduced than the story of how the young
poet entered into a combat with circumstances in order that he might
obtain a copy of Thomson’s “Seasons.” Mental agony, as well as a
superlative degree of hoarding, went to the purchase of that coveted
volume, the history of which is fully set forth in Mr. Frederick
Martin’s stimulating “Life of John Clare.” During these glowing months
the boy of genius had not ceased from utilising every chance scrap of
paper for the purpose of jotting down his exercises in rhyme. By means
of a forgivable trick he secured the verbal patronage of his father and
mother, who could not see any merit in his verses till he pretended
that they were the compositions of others. As poem after poem was
written their author stored them in a cranny in the wall, a retreat at
last invaded by Mrs. Clare, with the result that she was wont to help
the boiling of the kettle by burning underneath it the early pipings of
her son.

At this point, the youth in whose story the interest lies being sixteen
years old, Cupid, with no loss of his bright qualities after so many
centuries of exercise, comes into the recital. To JOHN CLARE, who was
moving rapidly towards the full worship of all things lovely, Mary Joyce
appeared to be nobody less bewildering and enchanting than a stray from
heaven; and though he was prevented from wearing her, the dice of
Fortune falling adverse from the box, he never ceased to regard her as
his ideal. Of the many pathetic incidents of his life not the least
touching is the fact that in his years of a broken brain he cherished as
a chief delusion the belief that Mary Joyce was indeed his wife. What
the feelings of a nature so intense were when the father of his
sweetheart intervened as the proverbial slip between the cup and the
lip, we can only conjecture, though the tracing of results is easy
enough. After leaving the tankards and the horses of the “Blue Bell,”
JOHN CLARE cast about him for some other form of employment. Escaping
the pains of stone-cutting and cobbling, he succeeded in becoming a
gardener’s apprentice at Burghley Park, the seat of the Marquis of
Exeter. Parker Clare began to think that his son was born with an
invisible silver spoon in his mouth, while to JOHN eight shillings a
week, with lodging free, smacked of the robbers’ cave in the “Arabian
Nights.” In reality, this position was altogether undesirable, for the
head gardener, not content to degrade himself alone by an excessive
swallowing of stimulants, actually devoted his best efforts to make
drunkards of his pupils. Unfortunately temptation loomed large at the
very moment when CLARE was ripe for mischief. Romance was worsted by
swipes (the indignity of the episode may be held to excuse the slang);
by means of such thin nepenthe, regret for the loss of Mary Joyce grew
less and less; and it not infrequently occurred that