John Clare (1793 - 1864)

John Clare (July 13, 1793 - May 20, 1864), English poet, commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet," the son of a farm labourer, was born at Helpston near Peterborough.

At the age of seven he was taken from school to tend sheep and geese; four years later he began to work on a farm, attending in the evenings a school where he is said to have learned. He then became a pot-boy in a public-house and fell in love with Mary Joyce, but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was gardener at Burghley Park. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with gypsies, and worked as a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief.

He was greatly patronized; fame, in the shape of curious visitors, broke the tenor of his life, and the convivial habits that he had formed were indulged more freely. He had married in 1820, and an annuity of 15 guineas from Lord Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, and he became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned, but new wants made his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again on the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Lord Fitzwilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home. Gradually his mind gave way.

His last and best work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed by "Christopher North" alone. He had for some time shown symptoms of insanity, and in July 1837 he was removed to a private asylum, and afterwards to the Northampton general lunatic asylum where he died on the 20th of May 1864.

Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of nature, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine feeling; but his vogue was no doubt largely due to the interest aroused by his humble position in life.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

First Line	Comments
'Tis evening; the black snail has got on his track,	1 Comment
Among the orchard weeds, from every search,
Among the taller wood with ivy hung,
And what is Life? An hour-glass on the run,	3 Comments
Christmass is come and every hearth
Come queen of months in company
Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
Far spread the moorey ground a level scene	1 Comment
Farewell to the bushy clump close to the river
How sweet and pleasant grows the way
How sweet to be thus nestling deep in boughs,
Huge elm, with rifted trunk all notched and scarred,
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows	4 Comments
I saw her crop a rose	1 Comment
In the cowslip pips I lie,
Is there another world for this frail dust
Love lives beyond the tomb,
Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
On Lolham Brigs in wild and lonely mood
Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
The cuckoo, like a hawk in flight,
The frog half fearful jumps across the path,
The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
The Maple with its tassell flowers of green
The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,
The winter comes; I walk alone,
These tiny loiterers on the barley's beard,
Up this green woodland-ride let's softly rove,
What is song's eternity?
When first we hear the shy-come nightingales,
When midnight comes a host of dogs and men	1 Comment
When once the sun sinks in the west,
Who hath not felt the influence that so calms
Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush	1 Comment