February 15, 2004

’John Clare’: Nature Boy

am -- yet what I am, none cares or knows'' is the first line of John Clare's most famous poem, and a more irresistible invitation to a biographer would be difficult to imagine. Jonathan Bate, an English academic, has responded with a fat tome that lays out a fair amount of what's known about this strange and often wonderful writer's life, and -- almost in spite of itself -- makes us care. Clare, unlike his Romantic contemporaries Byron, Shelley and Keats, lived to a ripish old age (70), but the long tale ''John Clare: A Biography'' tells is at least as sad as their foreshortened ones, because he spent better than a third of his span in lunatic asylums -- where on a good day he might turn out a lyric as starkly beautiful as ''Lines: I Am,'' and on a bad day might cover pages and pages with stanzas from his own ''Don Juan'' and ''Childe Harold,'' under the delusion that he was in fact Lord Byron.

Although Clare died in the obscurity of a madhouse, he had once been famous. In 1820, his first volume, whose title page read ''Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire Peasant,'' sold out its first printing, went back to press three times before the year was out, and made him, for a while, a literary celebrity. In the Romantic era, when nature was an object of reverence, a rustic bard like Clare was a highly marketable commodity. Whatever the 19th-century rural equivalent of street cred was, he had it. He was born in a small village called Helpston, raised by a farm-laborer father and an illiterate mother, and schooled sporadically; until the time of his unlikely success as a poet, he had earned his meager living by casual, seasonal agricultural work and such humble trades as lime burning and, briefly, soldiering. He liked to compose rhymes in his head when he was out in the fields, though, and would write them down later, if he could find any paper. If he couldn't, Bate tells us, he would sometimes peel bark off trees and write his verses on that. How authentic can you get?

Clare might easily have remained unknown to the world: just another flower born to blush unseen, as Gray's elegy had it. But once he was discovered -- plucked from the roadside, repotted and given plenty of sunlight by his London publishers -- his child-of-nature persona virtually guaranteed that he would flourish, at least for a season. As Bate's welcome new anthology, '' 'I Am': The Selected Poetry of John Clare,'' demonstrates, the early verse that made Clare a star was mostly no better than skillful apprentice work, more conventional and far less confident than his mature poetry. But it was apparent from the start that this poet looked at the natural world rather differently from his Romantic brethren. When Clare went out on a solitary ramble in the fields around his home, he came back not with visions of the sublime but with exquisitely precise images of birds and animals and trees and flowers, and news about the changes in the weather. Intimations of mortality were good enough for him.

And Clare never presumes to apostrophize nature, as Shelley does: ''Hail to thee, blithe spirit! / Bird thou never wert,'' and so on. Clare's skylark is, irreducibly, a bird -- and always was. His skylark poem, which appeared in his last, and best, collection, ''The Rural Muse'' (1835), is about survival. Clare is less interested in the skylark's song than in its nest, which, he tells us, rests ''upon the ground where anything / May come at to destroy''; after distracting a bunch of marauding boys with some singing and aerial acrobatics, the wily bird returns to the ground, where ''its low nest moist with the dews of morn / Lies safely with the leveret in the corn.''

You might suspect some irony in a concept like that -- a literally down-to-earth skylark -- but Clare was not a man of conspicuously ironic temperament. (This is one of the many reasons that his later attempts to imitate ''Don Juan'' seem so daft.) If anything, he identified himself too wholeheartedly with the natural phenomena he observed, sometimes even writing an entire poem in the voice of a ladybug, say, or a field. His obsession with nests -- about which he wrote an almost unseemly number of poems -- is unique, and revealing. He was such a fanatical nester himself that the move from the cottage in which he was born to another, just three miles away, may have been a contributing factor to his madness. In the poem that commemorates that relocation, you can hear him beginning to give way to the ''none cares or knows'' sort of alienation that characterizes his later work, and to a chronic, incurable nostalgia, which in this poem he still has the self-awareness to be a little sheepish about: ''I dwell on trifles like a child, / I feel as ill becomes a man.'' The very next lines predict the obsessiveness of his declining years: ''And still my thoughts like weedlings wild / Grow up to blossom where they can.''

The weedling thoughts that blossomed in John Clare's madness were often brilliant, in the startlingly direct manner of ''Lines: I Am'' or, perhaps even more disturbingly, ''An Invite to Eternity'': ''Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me / In this strange death of life to be, / To live in death and be the same, / Without this life or home or name.'' This is amazing stuff: gorgeous and heartbreaking and, thanks to the insistent balladlike rhythm (a feature of many of Clare's best poems), unnervingly memorable. It's hard not to feel that in his final years John Clare was a skylark endlessly circling in the air, singing and singing, because he couldn't find his nest in all the weeds.

Jonathan Bate diligently and sympathetically tries to account for Clare's insanity -- bipolarity is his best guess -- but, retro-diagnostics aside, the real mystery of this life is how a poet who appeared so attentive to and so at ease with the mutability of nature could lapse so absolutely into the static obsession of nostalgia. Early Clare is rhapsodic; late Clare is a long lament, lightened occasionally by remembered, never immediate, pleasures. Bate has an idea: ''Perhaps . . . he was always doomed to alienation, to a life spent between the two worlds of nature and art, of dwelling and writing.'' But Clare's life wasn't split in that way at all. Clare the man might, in fact, have been happier if he had recognized a clearer distinction between ''nature'' and ''art,'' or rather between the laws that govern the birds and the beasts and the flowers and the clouds and those that, more erratically, govern culture and human relations. His aching, inconsolable later poems seem to proceed from his disappointment that not everything in life is cyclic, as the seasons are -- that his first love, his childhood joys, his early fame will not come back like the primroses every spring. The innocence of his identification with nature was his poetry's strength, but it left him unprotected in winter.

Clare's work isn't well known in this country (until Bate's selection, the poems had been out of print here for decades), but in England it has become something of a cottage industry -- the cottage in question being inhabited by a chap named Eric Robinson, who has, controversially, managed to obtain the copyright on nearly all of Clare's 3,500 or so poems, and issued them in editions that faithfully reproduce the miserable spelling and nonexistent punctuation of the writer's manuscripts. It's like 1820 all over again, the Northamptonshire peasant poet sprung from the earth to gladden the hearts of nature worshipers and class warriors. Even his champions sometimes appear neither to know nor to care what this poetry is about. Bate frequently lapses into critical inanity when he discusses the work: ''And he finds the words to transform the ordinary into something magical'' is fairly typical. And this biography's final, awe-struck judgment on its unhappy subject is that he was ''without question the greatest laboring-class poet England ever gave birth to.''

Here in the New World, we're less astonished by the existence of unschooled, ''laboring-class'' poets, although we tend to encounter them on discs rather than on the printed page. Clare's work might be understood best, in fact, by those who can hear in it the sort of deceptively simple music we know from the likes of A. P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Skip James, Robert Johnson and Johnny Cash, all of them in thrall to their rural muse. Clare was, at heart, a ballad singer, the practitioner of a mournful and ecstatic art. One of his loveliest and most disconsolate poems, ''Decay: A Ballad,'' is constructed around the refrain ''O poesy is on the wane'' (he means his own, as well as the art in general); and the sentiment expressed there is exactly the one that animates Bob Dylan's great elegy ''Blind Willie McTell,'' whose refrain goes, ''I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.'' There was a time, I think it's fair to say, when no one sang the blues like mad John Clare.