John Clare: Poetry Literary Elements

Most of John Clare's poems are written from a first-person perspective. However, the speaker usually stays in the background of the poem, with the focus being on what he sees or experiences, rather than his own personality. The poem "I Am!," which details the speaker's conflicted sense of self, is an exception.

Clare usually writes in iambs, or pairs of one unstressed and one stressed syllable. Though he sometimes employs iambic pentameter, or five pairs of iambs, he uses differing line lengths throughout his work. Most of his poems rhyme, but rhyme schemes differ from poem to poem. "The Badger" is one of many poems he wrote in heroic couplets, an outdated form composed of pairs of rhymed lines. He also wrote numerous sonnets about the natural world..

Clare uses figurative language minimally. Some of his poems, like "The Badger," are straightforward descriptions without any metaphors or similes. Others, like "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb," are so abstract that there is little room for comparisons. However, he does use some figurative language in the majority of his works. For example, in "Autumn," he employs several similes to compare elements of the landscape to domestic objects. He uses more heightened comparisons in "I Am!," where he metaphorically describes his life as a "sea of waking dreams."

As a poet who was very attuned to the sound of language as well as its meaning, Clare employed alliteration and assonance frequently. For example, in the first line of "The Yellowhammer's Nest," he repeats the "b" sound, "Just by the wooden brig a bird flew up."

Clare's poems are rarely ironic, as the poet tends to be quite earnest in his attitude towards his subject matter, and genuine in the ways he expresses emotions. Yet sometimes irony serves to intensify the emotional meaning of a poem. For example, in "Autumn" the speaker tells us that the dry fields look like water because their hard surface sparkles in the sunlight. This is ironic, because it is the lack of water that makes the fields appear wet. Yet here the irony does not undermine the speaker, but rather emphasizes the power of the gaze to transform the world into a stranger and more awe-inspiring place.

Pastoral poetry, peasant poetry, poetry of the sublime

Most of Clare's poems are set in the countryside or in his native village of Helpstone.

Clare's tone varies from poem to poem, but his speakers are frequently melancholy or longing. Other times the tone is surprisingly distant and objective, as in "The Badger."

Many of Clare's poems, including "The Badger" and "The Yellowhammer's Nest," have an animal as the protagonist. In others poems that center the speaker's experiences, he is the protagonist.

Many of Clare's poems are unified by the conflict between the impermanence of the world and the speaker's desire for contact with eternity. We see this conflict in "Autumn," "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb," and "I Am!" "I Am!" also depicts a conflict between the speaker, who wants to have a secure sense of himself, and the instability of the world he lives in. This same conflict informs "First Love," which similarly depicts the speaker caught between ordinary life and the overwhelming and transformative experience of falling in love. Conflicts can also center animals, as in "The Badger" and "The Yellowhammer's Nest." In these poems, animals fight to stay alive despite inhabiting a hostile world. These conflicts also reflect Clare's interest in the conflict between impermanence and eternity.

The climax tends to occur in the final stanzas of the poems, often when Clare introduces a radically different way of being in the world. For example, "Autumn" ends when the world is bathed in golden light and the speaker suddenly experiences the countryside as a sublime, awe-inspiring place.

The first lines of "The Yellowhammer's Nest" foreshadow the discussion of the snake at the end of the poem. The warbler is frightened away from its nest, and Clare reflects that a bee could drown in the tiny stream that flows by the nest. Even for the tiny creatures who populate the idyllic bank of the brook, danger and death are daily realities.

Clare rarely employs understatement, as his poetry tends to be straightforward and earnest. He does sometimes understate the reality of death, as in the ending of "I Am!," in which he reduces death to a form of sleep. The poem "The Dying Child" similarly describes a dead child as merely asleep.

Clare's most frequent allusions are to Christian religious thought, as well as Greek mythology. In "The Yellowhammer's Nest," he alludes to the landscape of Greek mythology, comparing it to the tiny world inhabited by the warblers. In "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb," he subtly alludes to the creation story by referencing "Eve's dews," gesturing towards Eve's responsibility for mankind being expelled from paradise and doomed to mortality.

Clare uses metonymy only occasionally. In line 10 of "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb," he uses "hours" metonymically, to stand in for those months of the year when the world is green.

Clare often personifies nature. For example, in both "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb" and "The Yellowhammer's Nest" he invests nature with a voice of its own.

Clare's poetry often describes dramatic experiences in terms that might seem hyperbolic to us. For example, in "First Love" Clare writes that when he first saw his love, he turned "pale as deadly pale." However, hyperbole is not meant to be taken literally, and assumes some distance between the reader and the subject of the poem. In contrast, Clare asks us as readers to share in the extreme experiences he describes in his writing. Though the poems may overstate what really happened, the strength of Clare's language encourages us to share in the intensity of the recounted experience while we read, and to see that there is a kind of spiritual reality to what Clare describes.

Clare often employed onomatopoeia, especially in his middle period, when he began experimenting more with language. For example, in "Autumn" the sound of the word "bubbles" in the fourth line echoes the popping sound of bubbles themselves. For more on Clare's use of onomatopoeia, see the article "Listening with John Clare" by Stephanie Kuduk Weiner.