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Like a memory lost.
John Clare (1793 - 1864): Born to a poor laboring family in Northamptonshire, his education was only reading and writing before he started working. In his early teens, he began to write poetry. In 1920, he married Martha Turner and published his first book of poems. He was described as a peasant on the first page, and a popularity of 'rural poetry' at the time gave him a bit of celebrity. His popularity faded in the 1830s, and his publishers began to demand correction of some of his style and dialect in order to fit with current convention. The strain of it combined with financial problems resulted in his entrance into a mental asylum in 1837. He escaped the asylum in 1841 and walked to his childhood hometown, believing he would be reunited with his first love, Mary Joyce, there. He entered the Northamptonshire General Asylum a few months later, where he would stay for the rest of his life, continuing to write poems.
"In such a beautiful wilderness of wild flowers we are amused with the very variety and novelty of the scene so much that we in our pleasure lose all sense of weariness or fatigue in the length of our wanderings and get to the end before we are aware of our journey." -John Clare
"Autumn"
The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all
still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and
dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
"I Am"
I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.
"The Dying Child"
He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too
well.
His little hands, when flowers were seen,
Were held for the bluebell,
As he was carried o'er the green.
His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee;
He knew those children of the spring:
When he was well and on the lea
He held one in his hands to sing,
Which filled his heart with glee.
Infants, the children of the spring!
How can an infant die
When butterflies are on the wing,
Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at spring?
He held his hands for daisies white,
And then for violets blue,
And took them all to bed at night
That in the green fields grew,
As childhood's sweet delight.
And then he shut his little eyes,
And flowers would notice not;
Birds' nests and eggs caused no surprise,
He now no blossoms got;
They met with plaintive sighs.
When winter came and blasts did sigh,
And bare were plain and tree,
As he for ease in bed did lie
His soul seemed with the free,
He died so quietly.
"Summer"
Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges
full of bloom,
And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,
And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast;
She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her
hair,
And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair;
I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest,
And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.
The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,
The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,
And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy
nest
In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's
breast;
I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her
ear
That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my
dear;
I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away
Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of
the day.
"What is Life?"
And what is Life? An hour-glass on the run,
A mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still-repeated dream.
Its length? A minute's pause, a moment's thought.
And Happiness? A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.
And what is Hope? The puffing gale of morn,
That of its charms divests the dewy lawn,
And robs each flow'ret of its gem -and dies;
A cobweb, hiding disappointment's thorn,
Which stings more keenly through the thin disguise.
And what is Death? Is still the cause unfound?
That dark mysterious name of horrid sound?
A long and lingering sleep the weary crave.
And Peace? Where can its happiness abound?
Nowhere at all, save heaven and the grave.
Then what is Life? When stripped of its disguise,
A thing to be desired it cannot be;
Since everything that meets our foolish eyes
Gives proof sufficient of its vanity.
'Tis but a trial all must undergo,
To teach unthankful mortals how to prize
That happiness vain man's denied to know,
Until he's called to claim it in the skies.
"Decay"
Amidst the happiest joy a shade of grief
Will come - to mark in summer's prime a leaf
Tinged with the Autumn's visible decay
As pining to forgetfulness away
Aye blank forgetfulness that coldest lot
To be - and to have been - and then be not
E'en beauty's self, love's essence, heaven's prime
-
Mate for eternity in joys sublime,
Earth's most divinest, is a mortal thing
And nurses time's sick Autumn from its Spring
And fades and fades till wonder knows it not
And admiration hath all praise forgot
Coldly forsaking an unheeding past
To fade and fall and die like common things at last
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Q