The Name - What Does It Mean?

In looking at some of the Victorian poets, I saw John Clare - an unknown name to me, and I decided to find out something about him. I began by reading his poem entitled "First Love" (p824 Norton Anthology), and I liked this poem. We have spent a lot of time this year reading and discussing poems, but lately my thoughts have been moving into another place. Some of this is connected with what has been posted by Prof. Kuin on the Victorians and his advisement that we remember the circumstances of the time period and what was occurring, for example, the industrial revolution. I have also been asking myself if the separation of the poem from the poet does some kind of injustice? Does it matter if we pay very much attention to the circumstances surrounding a poet's creativity? I want to know more about the people who wrote these poems of the past. What were they about? What were their lives like?

John Clare's life (1793-1864) was interesting to read about. I used the new York on-line resource, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as a resource, as well as a book entitled, John Clare: His Life and Poetry, published in 1932. Clare was born in Helpston, Northamptonshire. Helpston is located on a ridge that divides the fens from the limestone wolds to the north of Helpston, where "wooded uplands dissolve into immense, falt open spaces". Clare's countryside was to be found within a 20 mile radius of Helpston, and this area includes a variety of landscapes, flora and fauna and farming systems. Clare was not only a poet, but also a farm labourer and a naturalist, and he represented this area with particularity in his poetry.

As a boy, he lived in a rented cottage with his parents and sister. His mother was illiterate. His father could read a little in the Bible. His parents wanted him to be educated so he was sent to school when agriculture was in a down time; otherwise, he performed the usual work of the village boys - sheep and cattle tending, crow-scaring and running errands. He also enjoyed time for playing, and he spent a lot of time with his friends out in the forest and fields. There were Gypsies who used to camp near Helpston, and he became interested and familiar with one tribe especially, that of King Boswell. He learned their customs, their songs, their dances, observed their fortune-telling and admired their girls. To Clare, they represented freedom from law and convention, and he associated them in his imagination with other outsiders, such as vagrants, Robin Hood and his men, robbers, highwaymen, pickpockets, village idiots, wise women, wizards, and girls of easy virtue. As well as these, he would meet people at local fairs - recruiting sergeants, ballad-singers, beggars, forgers, wounded veterans, and players of games of chance. He was no stranger to the alehouse or to the Stamford bull running, to the fox-hunt or badger baiting. He knew rural society well.

Not only did Clare read, but he was also educated in the fields, and became one of the earliest and best naturalists of Northamptonshire. From his parents' singing he learned hundreds of local folk-songs and became one of the earliest collectors of folk-songs and dances in his area. He played the popular jigs and reels of the day on his fiddle. He also wrote many religious poems, including biblical paraphrases. He eventually owned over 400 books and read many more than this.

While he was at school, he fell in love with a girl named Mary, who became the emotional centre of Clare's life. After some time, she broke off their affair and he was devastated, but quickly entered into a new love affair with a girl named Martha. Martha became pregnant, and Clare and she were married in 1820. Mary and Martha were the two muses of his life, and "like their scriptural namesakes, represented the idealistic and the practical natures of woman". Later in Clare's life, he went mad and during this time, he thought of himself as married to both women and having children with both of them, and thought he was being kept in a madhouse as a punishment for bigamy. Clare loved women, and he had affairs outside of his marriage. His poems about love and marriage cover the range from the sentimental to the mystical and from the romantic to the satirical. Women and nature were the twin themes of much of his poetry.

Clare's first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1820 and a second book, The Village Minstrel was published in 1820 as well. In 1827, The Shepherd's Calendar was published but sold badly. In 1835, The Rural Muse was the last volume of Clare's work that was published in his lifetime. A vast amount of poetry and a considerable quantity of prose remained unpublished until the latter part of the 20th-century, among which were political and social satire, "The parish", an autobiography, essays on natural history, short stories, proverbs, and comments on religion, politics, and poetry.

Throughout Clare's working life, he was beset with difficulties. He fathered nine children, two of whom died. The profits from his books were small and often delayed and he only had access to the interest on the funds collected for him. He worked par-time as an agricultural labourer, but in the agricultural depression following the Napoleonic wars, jobs were scarce. Clare drank too much and did not enjoy being a farm labourer. His health was also bad, and he seems to have suffered from epilepsy and may have contracted venereal disease. He was treated with suspicion by his neighbours who thought he had risen above his station. In all of this, however, Clare worked at his writing, striving to maintain himself by his poetry and other compositions.

Clare's mental health had been in decline for some years, and he was afflicted by depression, sleeplessness, and nightmares, and began to lose his sense of identity. He was besieged by his creditors and hemmed in by domesticity. He had become distrustful of his publishers and felt unable to support himself and his family. He became a voluntary patient at an asylum from 1937-1941. He suffered from delusions, imagining himself to be, at different times, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Lord Nelson, and Ben Caunt, the prize-fighter. He began to write letters and poems in code in which all the vowels were omitted. One day he walked away from the asylum headed for home. He wrote about this experience in Clare by Himself - 'Journey out of Essex' Five months after his return to Northborough, Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum by an order of two doctors. For the most part, he was given freedom to roam around Northampton and he continued to write poems, many of which were transcribed and preserved. He lived at the asylum until his death in 1864.

The following are a few of the poems Clare wrote while he was in the asylum, and which remained unpublished until years after his death:

Love's Pains
This love, wrong understood,
Oft turned my joy to pain;
I tried to throw away the bud,
But the blossom would remain.

Untitled:
Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,
The faithful, young and true.

Untitled:
Love lives with nature, not with lust
Go seek it in the flowers.

Borne upon an Angel's Breast
In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death.

'they' are the priests of the doctrine of Original Sin, as well as the disillusioned romantic, the negative, and the despairing.

Secret Love
I hid my love when young till I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my love to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light;
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in every place:
Whene'er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.

I met her in the greenest dells,
Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells;
The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,
The bee kissed and went singing by.
A sunbeam found a passage there,
A gold chain round her neck so fair;
As secret as the wild bee's song
She lay there all the summer long.

I hid my love in field and town
Till e-en the breeze would knock me down;
The bees seemed singing ballads o'er,
The fly's buzz turned a lion's roar;
And even silence found a tongue,
To haunt me all the summer long;
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love.

Clare wrote that a poet's soul lay 'buried in the ink' with which he wrote. Its import is how 'secret' in essence love's very communication may be. Glib, overt, noisy--it is likelier to be tainted with apathy or other falsities. Love is the prime riddle we have been given to solve. And nature, in this poem offers no help at all.

In 1989, Clare was commemorated by a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, at a ceremony in which the poet laureate, Ted Hughes, and others read Clare's poems. Clare is rightly acknowledged by many to be England's finest nature poet. He wrote extensively about his religious experience, expressed his criticism of the enclosure movement, the poor law, the relationship between the classes, the arrogance of local government, and the importance of the English language as spoken by common man. His early poems, except for those written in dialect, are often deeply influenced by the poetic vocabulary of Thomson and Cowper, although even in his early works, Clare created his own poetic language out of the resources of local speech. As he matured, the identity of his poetic language became increasingly certain. Clare' prose writings await fuller evaluation, but his place as a collector of folk-song, both words and music, and folk ceremonies has been an important part of recent Clare studies. He was a writer of imagination and diversity.

Having spent some time reading about Clare and thinking about this man's life, has been worthwhile for me. It has given me a greater appreciation of how the circumstances of life, which are often times not easy, can produce something positively creative - a mark of beauty on something that otherwise might be without colour.

Note: New Addition to York's E-Resources At Home

This past week, York has added another Oxford publication to their e-resources at home. It is The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and contains more than 50,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles from earliest times to 2001. I thought this would be of interest.

"The Stolen Child" - is there hope for recovery?

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Roses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And Whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round dthe oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

William Butler Yeats 1889 (p. 1083 Norton Anthology)

This poem is one that I very much enjoy. It is an escape poem from the trials and tribulations of the 'real' world. I can imagine the people in this period of time were kept continually pressured by the growing industrial mentality. The movement from rural to urban in order to supply the labour market changed life as it had been known.

More than 100 years have passed since this poem was written. Considering that "production" is the emphasis of today, along with "cost-cutting measures", how much has changed? And if these production jobs are disappearing from North America, they are not disappearing from the world, but only capturing the uninitiated into the giant cog that feeds the greed machine.

To escape even for a short time into a wild place hand in hand with a faery from a world full of weeping, may be just what Yeats' imagination needed to write for his time, but does it not yet speak to us in our time? This poem captures my imagination - dances, holding hands, mingling glances, leaping, chasing frothy bubbles. It speaks to the child in me that sometimes needs to escape a weeping world. Oh yes!

Looking at Romance: something from the German Romantic School

I began this blog originally, by doing some research and reading on Keats. There are times when I get reading one thing, and end up following some interesting detours, and this has been one of those times. On this detour, I have been reading something about the romantic period (approximately 1798-1850) in connection with the German school of thought, and in particular have been looking at Romanticism and Nature. I found this quoted passage in a book called, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany (Robert M. Wemaer). I post it here because the quote is that of Tieck, who occupied the same position among the German romanticists as did Wordsworth among the English.

I would like to look at the historical context (social, political) that influenced writers and poets over this 50 year period to become part of this movement, and I hope to do some more research in this area before we have flown on by in our studies to a different period, if only because these periods are not disconnected from one another, nor does one stop one day and another begin the next.

The romanticist did not attach beauty of nature to the outside object, but rather, it was through "seeing imagination" and "sympathetic heart", that the poet was able to put himself in the place of something in nature in moments of contemplation. I question whether this thought, expressed in the past tense, cannot also be applied to poets today. In any case, it is Tieck's quote that follows, that I thought may be found to be of some interest to our studies at this time because there is connection between what happens in different countries, even if it plays out a lot differently or only with slight difference.

"Do you think we are really able to describe nature as it is?" asks Tieck in one of his critical writings. "Every eye must see it in a certain connection with the heart, else we do not see anything, at least nothing that would please us if told in verse. Is not every person of a poetic mind put into a mood in which trees and flowers appear to him like living and friendly beings, and is this not the interest that we take in nature? Not the green shrubs and plants delight us, but the hidden divinations that arise, as it were, from them and greet us. Man discovers then new and wondrous relations between himself and nature. Nature sympathizes with his pains and his sorrows, and he feels towards these lifeless objects friendship and affection; and, after that, no beautification, no sham additions, are needed to help along the beauty and charm of poetry....It seems to me it is plain enough that man looks upon nature as a thinking and feeling being; that, therefore, in looking upon a leaf or, perchance, upon the great ocean, many things will suggest themselves to his mind which are not in these objects themselves if seen by beings differently organized, but in man's own soul."

This passage in the book goes on to say that this is the "good side of the matter", and that it had also an "evil side", and that both of these tendencies could be studied in the works of Tieck. I find the use of the word "evil" interesting. Tieck was able to express in the above passage his personal "I", but Wemaer, says there is more to be considered. Apparently Tieck was so taken up with his ability to dream himself into nature's many forms, he forgot the real poetic end. Wemaer: "We admire the great human I for its wonder-working ability to do all these things [feel feelings, float in the sky, dissolve in the water, rustle with the wind, inhale fragrance]; we appreciate the poet's triumphant joy in making use of this ability granted him above all other mortals; and yet what is the purpose of it all? May the poet make use of his gift for its own sake, or should he use it for a higher end!"

These are interesting questions he poses. I have to ask myself whether there is some kind of responsibility attached to a published poet, or was there in earlier times a belief that poets had influence on society, and therefore were required (in some unwritten law), to be responsible for the thoughts conveyed in this high art form. We today in North America may not consider this question, or at least, not give it much thought. Should we? Are there not poets today in cultures somewhere in the world, who are admired and whose poetry is read, who have great influence? Is the poetry contained in music something we here need to be more aware of as having potential to have great influence on our society? I'm digressing here, but only to attempt to make the point that we perhaps do not ask enough questions. We accept readily and easily popular culture ideals and ideas. What are the ideas that are being conveyed?

Getting back to Tieck, he became self-indulgent, so that when his poetry is read, there is movement from one image to another of nature, but by the end of his poem, there is no definite picture that remains in the mind of the reader, and so there has been no definite thought or definite feeling conveyed. Impressionistic landscapes can be painted, and these landscapes were cultivated by the romanticists. Included in romantic era poetry were not only sights and lights, but also sounds of nature, sometimes conveyed by a shepherd pipe or a shepherd melody that conveyed primitive sadness and loneliness. Melody, landscape and mood merged into a spiritual ensemble. The romantic poet "attempted to reconcile the belief that God is in nature with the belief that God is revealed in nature; that God is an in-dwelling impersonal spirit with the belief that God is a person; a philosophic God with a belief in a biblical God."

Not unconnected with the romanticists was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), a Swiss-French philosopher and political theorist was one of the great figures of the French enlightenment and probably the most significant of those who shaped 19th-century Romanticism. Rousseau influenced people as Kant, Goethe, Robespierre, Tolstoy and the French revolutionists. His most celebrated theory was that of the “natural man”. He maintained that human beings were essentially good and equal in the state of nature but were corrupted by the introduction of property, agriculture, science and commerce. People entered into a social contract among themselves, established governments and educational systems to correct the inequalities brought about by the rise of civilization. Rousseau stood out as a new prophet in the history of man’s feelings for nature. The wild scenery, with cascades of water, mountains, abysses, gloomy forests, places of inaccessibility, lonely spots, were called in Rousseau’s day, “romantic”.

The romanticists, assumed a different, larger and more modern meaning. Although the romanticists were lovers of Rousseau’s type of scenery, they also liked the idyllic, pastoral or elegiac – all of nature, and not limited to any special kind of scenery. Love of nature was an intimacy of association. It grew out of spiritual connection between poet and nature. To the romanticists, nature was a world of living beings possessed of a life either given to them by the poet’s imagination, or already in them. They communed with nature as with beings possessed of an organization like their own selves, or with beings making up a vast world of divine revelations. They were symbolists and pantheists. Rousseau, had been, however, only a lover of nature and a theist.

The romanticists’ feeling for nature contained two approaches: subjective, in which “man is the measure of all things”, as expressed by Coleridge: - “Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!” and pantheistic, in which “God is prince of poets and the universe his chapbook”, as expressed by Tennyson: - “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;--Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.”

Subjective animation of nature was not entirely new. It is found in the later poetry of the Greeks, especially in Theocritus; in the Renaissance, where it reached its highest development in Petrarch; in Shakespeare; and in Goethe, by whom it was handed over to the romanticists. Pantheism was not new either. It is found in the philosophy of the Orieintals, the Greeks, the Neoplatonists, but it was rarely ever used for poetic purposes. Since the middle of the 18th-century, however, philosophy joined itself to poetry; and this new poetic pantheism came to occupy a dominant position in the whole activity of the German romanticists. The German romanticists paid a lot of attention to aesthetics and psychology - they did not naively commune with nature, but knew the why and wherefore of the whole psychological process. It is not known to what extent Homer, Theocritus, Petrarch or Shakespeare had become conscious of the play of mind on matter. As we read these poets, however, as well as the English poets we have been studying, this is an interesting idea to keep in mind. Do we see subjectivity? Do we see pantheism? Do we read with discernment?

Breathe.....It's Coming Soon!

COCOON

When leaves have changed and fallen to the earth,
Instilled in us is a sense awaiting signs of re-birth,
Deliverance from blanket of nature's rest,
Wherein hope abides with patience blessed.
So too
These days are short, sun scarce and bleak,
Stark trees bare branches like naked arms weak,
Against chill winds and sleet at hand,
As though in death, and yet beneath the stillness
Intuitive life that fights to renew the days,
Cocooned with hidden warmth enfolding and sure,
When you will rise, live, and love once more.