I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
The final stanza of “I Am!” exemplifies John Clare’s writing at its most beautiful, and its most heartbreaking. The poem has described Clare’s loss of self due to his lack of community. Rather than yearning to find community or regain a sense of who he is, Clare concludes the poem by expressing his desire to escape the world completely. The dreamless, childlike state he wishes for echoes death, and his desire to be with God in death echoes Christian beliefs about the afterlife. Yet for Clare, the ideal afterlife would be spent not with those he has lost in life, but rather alone, with the grass and sky he loved.
—Ay here it is, stuck close beside the bank
Beneath the bunch of grass that spindles rank
Its husk seeds tall and high—'tis rudely planned
Of bleachèd stubbles and the withered fare
That last year's harvest left upon the land,
Lined thinly with the horse's sable hair.
This stanza from “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” embodies the qualities of Clare’s middle career work that make it so beloved by critics. Clare uses language in unconventional ways, as in the phrases “spindles rank” and “bleachèd stubbles.” When we reread, we can determine that Clare means that the grasses form a rank, or ordered crowd, of spindly twigs, and that they appear like bleached stubble on the land. Yet the strangeness of his syntax and the unusual word choice makes us hear the sounds of the words before their meaning. The word stubble is almost an onomatopoeia, as its many sharp consonants mimic the rough texture of the dried grass. These lines also illustrate Clare’s skill in paying attention to the ecosystem. He notices that the warbler’s nest is made of the hay left behind after last year’s harvest, as well as the hairs shed by horses. These observations subtly stress that the yellowhammer exists in relationship to the broader world, including human economic activity.
I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
The first stanzas of “First Love” illustrate Clare’s tendency to combine deceptively simple style with unusual and surprising ideas. The first few lines are extremely conventional. They use a tired comparison between a beautiful woman and a flower. The rhyme scheme is also predictable, and Clare’s repeated use of the word “sweet” makes it even more clunky. Yet as we read further, we see that he’s doing something more interesting than what we might first expect. The line “my face turned pale as deadly pale” parallels the conventional flower comparison with another simile about a face. Here, however, the simile fails, and the poem can only compare the pale face to itself. The next lines depict an intense experience at odds with the saccharine sweetness of the first few lines. With the context of the rest of the stanza, we can interpret the conventionality of the first lines as a way for us to experience the speaker’s shift from someone who only knows love in the abstract, to someone who has felt its disruptive power firsthand.
