summary of trespass by john clare
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The poetry of John Clare
by James Graham
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'I dreaded walking where there was no path': the poetry of John Clare (1793-1864)
'I wandered lonely as a cloud'. There's nuance to this famous line that we may not always discern. Wordsworth was lucky to be able to wander so freely. The opening line of a poem by John Clare offers a different perspective: 'I dreaded wa
The poem is about trespass. Had he come across a host of daffodils his joy would have been qualified by the sure knowledge that they were the property of a landowner, and that he could be prosecuted simply for being there t
And when I gained the road where all are free
I fancied every stranger frowned at me
And every kinder look appeared to say
You've been on trespass in your walk today.
The trespass poem, with its rhyming couplets and skipping rhythm, seems quite benign, less angry than Clare's later poems about enclosure - as we shall see. But even here we find more than a hint of the new oppression that had fastened on rural life, something which as time went by was to aggrieve Clare more and more, and drive him at times to de
John Clare is different. He may sound like Wordsworth when he writes
I love at eventide to walk alone
Down narrow lanes o'erhung with dewy thorn,
some far region' would never
Clare salvages and collects, and displays for us a living museum of country life, both human:
The foddering boy along the crumping snows
With straw-band-belted legs and folded arm
Hastens and on the blast that keenly blows
Oft turns for breath and beats his fingers warm
and animal:
The hedgehog hides beneath the rotten hedge
And makes a great round nest of grass and sedge...
On the hedge-bottom hunts for crabs and sloes
and whistles like a cricket as he goes.
Two of his greatest poems, 'The Moors' and 'The Fallen Elm', were never published in his lifetime. In the former, Clare eloquently mourns the loss of the freedom that was enjoyed by country people when the land was theirs, held in common - tracts of unfenced land where cattle and sheep roamed freely and village children played by the brook-side and found wild berries in hedgerows:
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was never penned...
The childern sought thee in thy Summer shade
And made their playhouse rings of sticks and stone;
The mavis sang and felt himself alone
While in thy leaves his early nest was made
And I did feel his happiness mine own.
The elm is a victim not of the storm but of the landowner. The poet mourns its fall as the loss of a 'friend not inanimate' which 'owned a language by which hearts are stirred' but now knows only the 'language of pity and the force of wrong'.
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom - O I hate that sound...
Thus came enclosure - ruin was its guide
But freedom's clapping hands enjoyed the sight,
Though comfort's cottage soon was thrust aside
And workhouse prisons raised upon the site.
'
Enclosure for Clare was a greater evil than is implied by mere land-grabbing. It was theft not only of land but also of dignity and identity. It was a denial of access to an intimate knowledge of nature and a relationship with living things.
At one point in his long poem The Parish - unpublished, it almost goes without saying - Clare puts his anger into particular words that have come to seem prophetic. In the same tone of sorrow and anger found in so many of his poems, he laments the fate of poor men who may be hanged for the most petty theft,
While wealthy thieves with knaverys bribes endued
Plunder their millions and are not pursued.
Still, through all the years in the County Asylum and through times when he must have felt close to disintegration, he continued to write. His later poems were transcribed as fair copies by one of the asylum staff, including one of the best known and most memorable: