We have four years to the bicentenary of the birth of John Clare, and the definitive edition of his Collected Poems, including hundreds previously
unpublished, is being released in stages by Oxford University Press. The two-
volume Collected Early Poems 1804-1822 appeared earlier this year at £155 theset. When added to the Collected Later Poems 1837 - 1864 published in 1984, thisbrings the total so far to 2,439 pages of poetry, in four volumes costing twohundred and seventy pounds sterling and weighing just over eight pounds avoirdupous. The volumes covering the period 1823 - 1836 have still to appear.
Clare, in poverty all his life, suffered greatly from editors who not only
removed from anthologies poems that might offend "good taste", but who "corrected" his non-standard spelling and grammar, and who ignored the poetry that contained dialect words. All this is at last being rectified in the new edition. One of his best poems in his first published collection - according to Clare himself - began thus:
Who lives where Beggars rarley speed?
& leads a humdrum life indeed
As none beside herself would lead
My Mary
Who lives where noises never cease?
& what wi' hogs & ducks & geese
Can never have a minutes peace
My Mary
Who nearly battl'd to her chin
Bangs down the yard thro thick & thin
Nor picks a road nor cares a pin
My Mary
This uses the form and refrain of a poem by William Cowper, whom Clare admired. But of Clare's adaptation there were complaints. This country woman changed nappies, was not beautiful, and children laughed at her. Out went the poem, when the collection was reprinted. There was propriety to consider. Clare was to experience - in the form of neglect - that criticism Wordsworth had received when he had spoken of making poetry "near to the language of men."
Coleridge had replied that the intellectual capacity to connect facts was
inferior in a "rustic" compared with an "educated person", even if one imagined
"..a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so
far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar". Charles
Lamb commented on Clare's poetry in a letter to him of 1822: "There is a rustick Cockneyism as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone..."
But Clare had no desire to transplant a classical mythical landscape to his
Northamptonshire village. He knew what he was doing, as is evident in his
criticism of Keats, " ... wearisome to the reader where behind every rose bush
he looks for a Venus & under every laurel a thrumming appollo - in spite of all
this his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with
other inhabitants of great cities he often describes nature as she appeared to
his fancies & not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he describes".
There is never any doubt that Clare has witnessed what he describes, as in this
excerpt from "The Pettichap's Nest", chanced on, to Clare's astonishment, at the edge of a busy road:
- small bits of hay
Pluckt from the old propt-haystacks pleachy brow
And withered leaves make up its outward walls
That from the snub-oak dotterel yearly falls
And in the old hedge bottom rot away
Built like a oven with a little hole
Hard to discover - that snug entrance wins
Scarcely admitting e'n two fingers in
And lined with feathers warm as silken stole
And soft as seats of down for painless ease
And full of eggs scarce bigger e'en then peas
Here's one most delicate with spots as small
As dust - and of a faint and pinky red
- We'll let them be and safety guard them well
For fears rude paths around are thickly spread
He had a way of combining objective detail with a sense of tenderness. This
tenderness has nothing to do with sentimentality: the other writer whom I
usually think of as doing this in a different way is Chekhov, in his short
stories. Clare shares with you, the reader, a kind of privacy within a privacy:
the privacy of his walk or his rest in the countryside getting away from the
crowd, and the privacy of then "together" seeing events of nature that
momentarily occur to things or beings that as it were "don't know they're being
looked at." This gives the work a kind of urgent intimacy: it's as if he talked
in his mind and on the page to an imaginary other self which could occupy both
the literary tradition of the page and the oral here-and-now of a specific place
and time. There's the conclusion to "Schoolboys in Winter", describing
schoolboys playing in the frozen rural landscape on their morning way to school
in the next village. "Clumpsing" is glossed as "benumbed with cold":
- & on each shallow lake
Making glib slides were they like shadows go
Till some fresh pastimes in their minds awake
& off they start anew & hasty blow
Their numbd & clumpsing fingures till they glow
Then races with their shadows wildly run
That stride huge jiants oer the shining snow
In the pale splendour of the winter sun
Clare didn't need to bring Arcadia to Helpstone. He could transform a landscape
using his own direct observation and experience. Part of his literary
education, which was not narrow, was rooted early in the Bible. It is
Revelations, not Arcadia, that stands behind the following description of an
"ordinary" sunny morning: and what would "Standard English" have done to this?
The dew drops on every blade of grass are so much like silver drops
that I am obliged to stoop down as I walk to see if they are pearls, and
those sprinkled on the Ivy woven beds of Primroses underneath the hazels,
white thorns and Maples are so like gold beads that I stooped down to
feel if they were hard but they melted from my finger - And where the dew
lies on the Primroses the violets and white thorn leaves they are emerald
and berryl yet nothing more than the dews of the morning on the budding
leaves nay the road grasses are cover'd with gold and silver beads and
the further we go the brighter they seem to shine like solid gold and
silver - It is nothing more than the suns light and shade upon them in
the dewy morning - every thorn point and every bramble spear has its
trembling ornament till the wind gets a little brisker and then all is
shaken off and all the shining jewelry passes away into a common spring
morning full of budding leaves Primroses Violets Vernal Speedwell Blue
Bell and Orchis - and common place objects -
Clare's manuscripts are so many, so scattered, so often poorly preserved in
corrosive home-made ink with poems rubbed out and new ones written over, that"for reasons of space" the editors Eric Robinson and David Powell have held over the "full physical description" of the manuscripts and other sources until the final volume in the series. The manuscripts in Peterborough Museum have been deciphered "as a result of many months of turning the pages to different angles of sunlight." This is true scholarship: these volumes - whatever their price and weight - are long overdue.