John Clare 13 July 1793-20 May 1864, born in Summer, died in Spring, was for a time the half-forgotten Romantic poet. Against the aristocratic glamour of Byron and Shelley, Clare, the son of a farm labourer, did not seem to shine as brightly. But he knew the English countryside in ways that the younger Romantics did not, and his voice celebrates the beauty of nature, even as it mourns its destruction. Jonathan Bate, his biographer, calls Clare ‘the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.’ Alienated and unstable, John Clare spent the last decades of his life in an insane asylum where he continued to write poetry, including one of his greatest poems, I Am.
The Wind
I am John Clare
with bells in my hair
and bells at my knees
my ankles and feet
when I walk down the street
the people just stare
saying there goes poor Clare
mad as a March hare
where is he going today
like a fright and a scare
like a bear in a fair
with his raggedy clothes
who knows and nobody cares
he’s not one of theirs
too ruined with books
to sit with the workers
too rough in his ways
to sit with his betters
poor old John Clare
neither here nor there
fallen between
the sun and the moon
mad as a loon.
If I played you a tune
on my old violin
would you all dance along
if I sing an old song
that our fathers
and their mothers sang
about the sea and the land
and the rain in the air
the plenty of harvest
the fox in his lair
the rabbit and stoat
and the hole in the coat
where the wind whistles in
let us sing and begin
with beginnings
how the world came to be
with you on my knee
in this moment we share
here and under this tree.
I am John Clare
with stars in my hair
and stars in my eyes
but with stocks
on my ankles and feet
with a fence
at the end of the street
and the meadows are barred
and the land is all locked
and I cannot get out
and I cannot get in
where I wandered
before like the wind.