John Clare Country: Bucolic landscape of the most famous English poet you have never heard of
By: David A. Laws
Tags: History, English Literature, Poetry, England, Travel

Byron, Keats, Wordsworth — for a few brief months in 1820, when his first book of verse topped the English best seller list, John Clare, who toiled as a farm laborer near Peterborough 80 miles north of London, outsold them all. Hailed as the “Peasant Poet” by London society for his vivid descriptions of English rural life, fickle popular taste rejected his more accomplished later works.

“Fame blazed on me like a comets glare

Fame waned and left me like fallen star”

Born into rural poverty in 1793, his story is one of the most moving and tragic in a field rife with drama. After his brief blaze of fame, he returned to the fields to support his family. The world soon forgot John Clare.

He continued to write on whatever material came to hand. According to records at the Peterborough Museum sometimes he’d use the back of an invoice. Or, if he was out in the field, his hat band or slivers of bark from a tree. He wrote of the birds, flowers, trees, and gentle beauty of the landscape around his native village of Helpston eight-miles north of Peterborough.

“O who can pass such lovely spots

Without a wish to stray

& leave lifes cares a while forgot

To muse an hour away”

After several breakdowns he was committed to an asylum for the insane. By his death in 1864, he had composed over 3,500 poems, plus numerous essays and letters. In addition to the natural world, Clare’s works on love, politics, and environmental and social change provide an unsurpassed picture of early nineteenth century English rural life.

In 1989, Poet Laureate Ted Hughes unveiled a memorial to John Clare in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner inscribed with the phrase “Fields were the essence of the song." He is also celebrated by an annual festival in Helpston organized by the John Clare Society.

Several years ago, I made a driving tour of John Clare Country. I discovered a bucolic landscape of rolling countryside blessed with some of the finest stone towns and villages in England and nary a tourist in sight. Manicured hedgerows bordered patchwork fields of butter-yellow rapeseed (canola), verdant sheep pasture, and scattered groves and windbreaks of ash, hazel, hawthorn, and oak laced with languid meandering rivers straight out of Wind in the Willows.

In a recurring Clare image, an iridescent blur of plumage burst from the roadside as I slowed to avoid startled pheasants and pulled onto a grassy verge at Castor Hanglands. Now a national nature reserve, this remnant of an ancient hunting forest is the sole wild area remaining in a state familiar to John Clare prior to the 1809 Inclosure Act that restricted public access to former community lands.

The poet’s chronicles of the dislocation and hardship faced by working people as landowners fenced their fields in pursuit of more efficient agriculture leads some historians to speculate that his eventual incarceration was hastened by his public condemnation of the practice.

“Inclosure came and trampled on the graves

Of labourer’s rights and left the poor a slave”

Bluebells, celandine, and anemone on Emmonsales Heath

I tiptoed over a woodland carpet of bluebells, yellow celandine, and drooping white wood anemone. Clare celebrated this sanctuary of birds and flowers in his poem “Emmonsales Heath.”

“How beautiful through April time and May

The woods look, filled with wild anemonie”

Helpston

Village sign on the Green

The point of St. Botholph’s, the parish church of Helpston, broke the level horizon. John Clare’s childhood home lies a stone’s throw from its prominent tower.

“Hail humble Helpstone where thy valleys spread

And thy mean village lifts its lowly head

Unknown to grandeur and unknown to fame.”

The John Clare Trust purchased his family cottage in 2005. After restoration it reopened in 2009 as a center to celebrate his work and share his understanding of the natural world with future generations. Outwardly the house at 12 Woodgate Street, Helpston is little changed from an etching published in his first volume of poems. White stucco walls supporting climbing roses are overhung by thick thatched eaves. Inside, space intended for five families has been restored using traditional building materials and methods and opened up to create a series of galleries chronicling the life and times of the poet and his village. The garden flourishes with varieties of plants from his era.

Restored interior of John Clare Cottage, Helpston

After leaving school at age 12, young John worked at the Bluebell Inn that still stands next door. The landlord treated him “more like a son than a servant … I believe that this place was the nursery for my rhymes.” I bent under a low-beamed ceiling festooned with pewter tankards to enter a traditional English public house. Locals crowded up against the bar: Historic maps and lithographs decorated the walls.

John Clare Memorial and St. Botholph’s Church tower, Helpston

An ornate Victorian stone memorial inscribed with Clare’s verse stood outside St. Botholph’s churchyard gate. His gravestone sheltered in the lee of the chancel wall. Copies of his baptism and burial records were posted on a notice board.

Surrounded by mellow stone cottages, the predominantly 14th century chapel incorporates materials salvaged from Saxon and even earlier structures. Sections of mosaic pavement excavated from a nearby Roman villa were set into the floor. Such antiquities intrigued Clare and inspired an ambitious poem, “Triumphs of Time,” on the impermanence of human achievement.

Glinton

Clare walked two miles over flat fenland fields to school in the church at my next stop. Glinton village stands in the shadow of the graceful spire of St. Benedict’s.