A Forgotten Romantic

John Clare is one of those neglected nineteenth-century writers, like Melville and Hopkins, whose work was revived in the early twentieth century and became a sort of proto-modernist. Or, at least his later work was. During his lifetime, he achieved brief but intense stardom as a peasant-poet, a new Robert Burns, but after his fifteen minutes were over he went mad and spent the rest of his life is what was probably the most humane mental asylum in Victorian Britain. Rather than being beaten and locked in a windowless cell, he was allowed to walk in the gardens and was encouraged to continue writing poetry. This later poetry was not published until 1920, to the acclaim of many modernist writers. The following poem resonates particularly strongly with Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"Song"

I peeled bits o' straws and I got switches too
From the grey peeling willow as idlers do,
And I switched at the flies as I sat all alone
Till my flesh, blood, and marrow wasted to dry bone.
My illness was love, though I knew not the smart,
But the beauty o' love was the blood o' my heart.

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And flew to the silence of sweet solitude,
Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades,
Unseen of a' shepherds and flower-loving maids.
The hermit bees find them but once and away;
There I'll bury alive and in silence decay.

I looked on the eyes o' fair woman too long,
Till silence and shame stole the use o' my tongue;
When I tried to speak to her I'd nothing to say,
So I turned myself round, and she wandered away.
When she got too far off--why, I'd something to tell,
So I sent sighs behind her and talked to mysel'.

Willow switches I broke, and I peeled bits o' straws,
Ever lonely in crowds, in nature's own laws--
My ballroom the pasture, my music the bees,
My drink was the fountain, my church the tall trees.
Who ever would love or be tied to a wife
When it makes a man mad a' the days o' his life?

1842-64