Camille Ralphs: Eejip-Eejip

Camille Ralphs

Among John Clare’s drawings of ‘pootys’ (snail shells) and birds is a doodle of his imagined tombstone. It bears the inscription: ‘HERE Rest the HOPES and Ashes of JOHN CLARE.’ The masons missed the memo. Clare’s actual memorial, erected after his death in 1864, reads ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, borrowing the epithet from the title page of his first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). Unlike the epithets of other labouring-class poets, Clare’s doesn’t describe his main employment. Robert Burns was the Ploughman Poet; Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. We have at least three Shoemaker/Cobbler Poets: John Askham, John Gregory and Robert Bloomfield, whom Clare regarded as ‘the first of Rural Bards’. It seems unjust that Clare should be denied a proper job when he worked so hard, not only in the fields, lime kilns and parks but also at his desk, producing some ten thousand pages. But at least, unlike Edward Capern, he was spared the indignity of being called the Postman Poet.

Clare was born in 1793 in the village of Helpston in Northamptonshire. When the bookseller Ned Drury met him in 1819, he immediately saw an opportunity to market him as a ‘peasant poet’. Describing Clare in a letter to the publisher John Taylor, Drury wrote: ‘He is low in stature … ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls – somewhat idle – hates work.’ This was a little unfair, but not entirely wrong. After several early romances, Clare married Martha (Patty) Turner and they had nine children, two of whom were stillborn. Clare frequented prostitutes and had at least one affair. Despite being parlously fond of drink, or ‘John Barleycorn’ as he described it in ‘The Cellar Door’, he was productive. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, a hefty book of verse, was greeted with acclaim on its publication by Taylor & Hessey. Clare followed it up with The Village Minstrel (1821), The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) and The Rural Muse (1835). His speed of composition worked against him. Clare’s readership, originally delighted by the pauper rustic who had ‘found [his poems] in the fields and only wrote them down’, lost interest as his literary reputation became established. Clare had meagre society to shield him from that loss, particularly after Taylor and his business partner, James Hessey, sold the London Magazine – Clare’s ‘university’, in Roger Sales’s words – in 1825.

Clare was never psychologically robust. On his first trip to London in March 1820 he noted ‘such strange feelings that I coud almost fancy … that I was not the same John Clare but that some stranger soul had jumped into my skin’. Gradually, he began to lose trust in reality. Watching a production of The Merchant of Venice in 1830, he shouted at the actor playing Shylock, seemingly unable to distinguish between performer and character. By this point he owed his publishers £141 (six years’ farming wages). In 1837 he was sent to the High Beech asylum in Epping Forest. He claimed that he was Lord Byron, whose funeral procession he had witnessed in 1824. In July 1841 he escaped and walked the eighty miles back home, eating the roadside grass, sleeping with his head pointed north to remember his way in the morning. Clare failed to recognise Patty when she found him on the Great North Road and dragged him onto her cart. Nonetheless, ‘his wife thought him so much better that she wished to try him for a while,’ according to Clare’s doctor. The trial was not a success. In December he was admitted to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death.

Clare’s tombstone in Helpston declares that ‘A poet is born not made,’ echoing sentiments expressed during his lifetime. In 1822 the Eclectic Review noted that ‘such a poet as John Clare, education could not have made, nor could adversity destroy’ – a challenge to fate if ever there was one. Clare was undoubtedly a victim of his circumstances, but those circumstances also afforded him a peculiar education. From the age of five he was schooled for a few months a year in everything from penmanship to mathematics; he spent the rest of the year in the fields, threshing with a child-sized flail. (One teacher he honoured in verse was James Merrishaw, ‘who so skilld in arts would yield to none./And Science own’d him for her darling son.’ How far this is from Wordsworth’s smug ‘Enough of Science and of Art;/Close up those barren leaves.’) Clare’s scientific education expanded after he began gardening at Burghley Park in 1807 and advanced further in the 1820s through his relationship with the Fitzwilliam family of Milton Hall, north of Peterborough. As Sarah Houghton-Walker shows in her new book, which is structured around the different places where he lived, Clare developed close friendships with Milton Hall’s steward, Edmund Tyrell Artis (a geologist and archaeologist), and its head gardener, Joseph Henderson (who specialised in botany, ornithology and entomology). From 1823 to 1825 he worked on various prose anthologies on plants and birds, lavish fragments of which are preserved in his journals and ‘Natural History Letters’.

Clare’s growing sophistication is evident in his increasingly intricate descriptions of the natural world. He opens the sonnet ‘A Scene’ (from Poems Descriptive) with ‘The landscapes stretching view that opens wide/With dribbling brooks and river’s wider floods’. Later, in ‘The Old Willow’ (from The Rural Muse), the landscape becomes microscopically detailed:

The juicey wheat now spindles into earAnd trailing pea blooms ope their velvet eyesAnd weeds and flowers by crowds far off and nearIn all their sunny liveries appearFor summers lustre boasts unnumbered dyesHow pleasant neath this willow by the brookThats kept its ancient place for many a yearTo sit and oer these crowded fields to lookAnd the soft dropping of the shower to hearOur selves so sheltered een a pleasant bookMight lie uninjured from the fragrant rain

These lines have a tendrilled musicality: ‘For summers lustre boasts unnumbered dyes.’ Where ‘A Scene’, like many of Clare’s early poems, is largely gestural, ‘The Old Willow’ seems fully realised, its images crisp and tangible. The rhyme scheme is singular too, best rendered as ABAAB CACAC DEDE – a birdcall, almost. Clare excelled at logging birdsong: ‘eejip-eejip’, ‘cheer-up’, ‘chew-rit’, ‘grig-grig’, ‘tweet-tut’, ‘wet-my-foot’. Not for nothing was he known in London as ‘our Green Man’.

Clare’s rage at the enclosures, which privatised the land around his home when he was a teenager, often dominates discussions of his work. He knew his local environment intimately – as Richard Mabey notes, Clare was ‘granted 65 first county records for birds and more than 40 for plants’ – and could not otherwise have written such virid poems. But he was more versatile than his characterisation as a naturalist allows. As his prose anthologies fell by the wayside, so did other projects: he planned to write a polyphonic novel, a Marlovian drama and a biography of Bloomfield. He also compiled more than 250 formally notated folk tunes.

Clare always imitated. He claimed that his career as a rhymester began with his purchase of Thomson’s Seasons (1730), which he ‘clumb over’ a wall to read so that he wouldn’t be told off for slacking in the fields. In a letter to Taylor he included a ‘list of favourite Poems & Poets who went to nature for their images’, including Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley, Shakespeare, Milton, James Thomson (‘the Elizabethian poets of glorious memory’), Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth and Bloomfield. To this list of influences could be added Burns, Allan Ramsay and James Beattie (Clare made much of his maternal grandfather’s Scottish heritage: ‘I would sooner be the Author of Tam o shanter then of the Iliad & Odyssey of Homer,’ he wrote in 1820). Though Clare modelled himself partly after Bloomfield, he ‘cannot be called a peasant poet’, Edward Thomas argued in 1917, as his work relies primarily on literary models.

Some of Clare’s best imitations have their origin in a letter he received from his friend and patron Eliza Emmerson in July 1820. Emmerson encouraged him to look to ‘the Elizabethan time’, since many poets of that period shared Clare’s ‘own feeling and simplicity’. The resulting impersonations appeared in the 1832 manuscript of The Midsummer Cushion, which was later condensed into The Rural Muse and was not published in full until 1978. Instead of aping an archaic tone like Chatterton’s ‘Thomas Rowley’ (though Clare does sometimes slip in a ‘thou’), he absorbed the measures of Elizabethan poetry while preserving his distinctive voice.

Clare did, however, manage to convince a few contemporaries that his mock-ups were the real thing. In 1825 he wrote to William Hone, the editor of the Every-Day Book (a calendar of English traditions), posing as ‘James Gilderoy of Surfleet, Lincolnshire’. He claimed that the enclosed poem, ‘Death’, was by Andrew Marvell and that he had found it among some old miscellanies. The forgery was published on 28 June. Clare carries off the imitation impressively, though he blows his cover with the line ‘whirring from the tortured string’ and the try-hard ‘Time, the prime minister of death!’

In a journal entry of 1824, Clare expressed his outrage at Horace Walpole’s treatment of Chatterton many years earlier. ‘When his gossiping fribble had discovered [Rowley’s poems] to be forgeries why did he not discover the genius of the author – no because they surpassd his Leadenhall forgery of “Otranto”.’ Clare sensed, as John Goodridge put it, that ‘the respectability of one and the notoriety of the other had more to do with social class than literary ethics.’ Clare wanted Chatterton to be assessed on his ability, not his social status. He also worried that he was destined for a similar fate. Around 1809 his mother gave him a handkerchief printed with Chatterton’s image and said ‘she little thought I shoud be a poet … for Chattertons name was clouded in mellancholly memorys.’ Among Clare’s drawings from the early 1820s is a second tombstone: ‘To the Memory of CHATTERTON KEATS and BLOOMFIELD’.

John Gibson Lockhart, in his supercilious review of Keats in Blackwood’s, was not the first to argue that ‘the just celebrity of Robert Burns … has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm servants.’ Reviewers and early biographers would later suggest that Clare should not have nurtured his literary aspirations. The documents admitting him to High Beach attribute his illness to ‘years addicted to Poetical prossing’. By June 1840 he was so estranged from the literary establishment that the Halifax Express reported him dead ‘some months ago’ in an asylum in York. The Times repeated this, as did several other papers. In his essay on identity, which he wrote in the Northampton asylum a year later, Clare warned: ‘Forget thyself & the world will willingly forget thee till thou art nothing but a living-dead man.’

Clare spent 27 years in psychiatric care. Among his biographers, Jonathan Bate and John and Anne Tibble have suggested that he was bipolar, Geoffrey Grigson that he was schizophrenic. Sean Haldane reckons Clare was struck by chronic meningovascular syphilis. (In his Sketches, Clare admits to being ‘coaxed about to bad houses’ and afflicted ‘by an illness too well known and too disgusting to mention’.) Then again, as Houghton-Walker reminds us, he also claimed he ‘never was very ill only harassed by perpetual bother’. Whatever the cause, his ‘blue devils and low spirits’ grew worse and his delusions more grandiose. He had experienced the Battle of the Nile; his head was shot off at Waterloo; he was Shakespeare; he was a champion prizefighter, ‘Nonpareil’ Jack Randall or ‘Giant’ Ben Caunt. He believed he was bigamously married to Mary Joyce, a former lover, and when he escaped from High Beech in 1841, he believed it was Mary he was returning to. (She had died three years earlier.) Despite his condition, Clare wrote scores of poems during his four years at High Beech; later, during his 23 years at Northampton, he composed more than five hundred, mostly in the 1840s.

Critics often divide Clare’s writing life into three parts. The early period, from 1804 to 1822, covers his years in Helpston, when he learned his craft and published Poems Descriptive and The Village Minstrel. During the middle period, from 1822 to 1837, he was at his most creative, completing The Shepherd’s Calendar and embarking on many other projects. His move to a house in Northborough in 1832, where he felt ‘homeless at home’, marked a change in mood and style that preceded the publication of The Rural Muse. The final, or asylum, period lasted from 1837 until his death. Across these periods, the shift in Clare’s style is so pronounced that his poems seem to have been written by two or three different people.

In 1851 the critic Edwin Paxton Hood called Clare ‘the Laureat of the Birds’ nests’ and regretted that ‘now, even in literary circles, [his poems] are unreferred to, if not entirely unknown.’ His bird and nest poems epitomise some of the changes in his style. In the peaceable pre-Northborough poems, the threat to animal habitats is mostly kept at bay: ‘Hark there she is as usual lets be hush’ (‘The Nightingales Nest’). But the Northborough nest poems, hostile to non-Saxon diction, are sentence-units stacked like cut logs, with mostly monosyllabic rhythms. They sound friable yet trampling, childish yet huge. In ‘The Puddock’s Nest’ the birds are assaulted by a boy who ‘takes them home and often cuts their wing/And ties them in the garden with a string’. Many of the poems from Clare’s middle period end with acts of crushing violence in serene surroundings. ‘The Partridge’, in which a bird cries for help to some oblivious chickens, ends: ‘But still they kept their seat and left no trace/And old cows snorted when they passed the place.’

An even greater change occurs in the asylum period. Clare’s poems ‘Written in Prison’ (to quote one title), where he ‘sigh’d o’er bird pleasures but no nest destroyed’, depart entirely from convention, rather like Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and Song to David, supposedly written in charcoal on the walls of St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. During the phase in which he was convinced he was Byron, Clare wrote his own versions of ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Don Juan’. Although the latter borrows the ottava rima and droll multisyllable rhymes of Byron’s poem, its impetus is far more Juvenalian. It begins: ‘Poets are born – and so are whores.’ Clare also produced a selection of ‘Biblical Paraphrases’, the best of which is ‘Lord hear my prayer when trouble glooms’ (after Psalm 102).

In Clare’s work from Northampton, the whole notion of identity comes loose, the ‘I’ a ‘mighty vapour’, as he put it in a letter to Emmerson from March 1830. ‘Taken as a whole,’ Houghton-Walker says, ‘his verse suggests he was distinctly less interested in writing about specifics.’ While some ballads and songs in his ‘Child Harold’ seem crazed, many of the asylum poems are real achievements, not least the love lyrics, whose power lies partly in their sense of shaky embodiment. Take ‘First Love’:

I could not see a single thing,Words from my eyes did start –They spoke as chords do from the string,And blood burnt round my heart.

‘An Invite to Eternity’ begins with ‘dark obscurity’, ‘sad non-identity’ and hellish visionary scenes (‘Where stones will turn to flooding streams’), then moves to its close through what Clare called, in March 1821, ‘that unriddled blank of fancys terrors and confusions’:

Say maiden wilt thou go with meIn this strange death of life to beTo live in death and be the sameWithout this life, or home, or nameAt once to be, and not to beThat was, and is not – yet to seeThings pass like shadows – and the skyAbove, below, around us lie

The echo of Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ (‘before, behind, between, above, below’) turns the sky into a bed for the long conjugation of souls. Many of these poems, in their riffing on the verb ‘to be’, seem to draw on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan influences. ‘I Am’ is Clare’s best lyric of this kind. The poem’s most fruitful – and fruitless – ambiguity is its closing chiasmus: ‘So let me lie,/The grass below; above the vaulted sky.’ The self drifts ‘like vapours tost’, so the lines could suggest, as in ‘An Invite to Eternity’, wraith-like orbiting above both grass and sky, or, more obviously, the poet lying on a tussock with the sky above him.

The verse Clare wrote at Northampton was preserved largely through the efforts of William Knight, a member of staff at the asylum who transcribed some eight hundred poems given to him by Clare. Knight moved to Birmingham in 1850, and we have little evidence of any work Clare may have produced during the following decade. A small cluster of late poems, written after 1860, survives. ‘Birds Nests’ is generally regarded as his final poem and is thought to have been written in the months before his death in May 1864. It bears a misremembered epigraph from ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ (‘The very child might understand/The De’il had business on his hand’) and runs like this:

Tis Spring warm glows the SouthChaffinchs carry the moss in his mouthTo the filbert hedges all day longAnd charms the poet with his beautifull songThe wind blows blea oer the sedgey fenBut warm the sunshines by the little woodWhere the old Cow at her leisure chews her cud

Do these seven lines constitute the entirety of the poem, or did ‘that unriddled blank’ cut in? It’s not like Clare to leave a rhyme unanswered. (In ‘The Fens’, a celebration of the floodlit, gorging wetlands, he rhymes ‘fen’ with ‘again’.) The infelicities of grammar, however, are entirely characteristic. Clare had always tried ‘to make his consceptions correct thinkings rather than the correct placing of particles and stops’. Bate compares his happy use of solecisms to his discontent with the Linnean taxonomic system. The Peasant Poet, who frequently misspelled his epithet ‘the Pheasant Poet’, would not be classified.

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