The Sublime
The sublime was one of the most important ideas in nineteenth-century spirituality. It describes an overwhelming emotional experience of awe and terror in response to the landscape. Many poets attempted to recreate the feeling of the sublime for the readers of their poetry. These poems usually described vast panoramas or extraordinary weather, with popular topics including the ocean, the mountains, and storms or tempests. As a peasant without the means to travel, John Clare probably went his whole life without seeing mountains or the ocean. Instead, his nature poetry described his native countryside. In poems like “Autumn,” “First Love,” and “I Am!” he locates sublime experience in the more humble landscape of the English countryside. The possibility of finding sublime experience in a familiar place is the central theme of “Autumn.” The first two stanzas depict the landscape realistically, and repeatedly compare aspects of it to the objects typical of a country home. Yet in the final stanza, Clare takes this same landscape and makes it the site of a sublime experience, in which the sunlight transforms the river, the hilltops, and the air into molten gold. In this suddenly strange place, the speaker encounters “Eternity.” The poem suggests that one does not need a vast or unfamiliar landscape to experience something bigger than oneself. Instead, one merely needs to learn how to look closely enough to see what is awe-inspiring about the places one knows best.
Presence of God in the World
One of the most persistent themes in John Clare’s poetry is the presence of God in the world. Like most nineteenth-century British people, Clare was raised Christian, and he retained the faith throughout his life. However, he was somewhat skeptical of organized religion, and his poetry tends instead to depict a more independent and individual relationship with God based in the natural world. In poems like “I Am!” and “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” Clare finds God in the growing world and the vast sky. He often uses the word “heavens” in place of “sky,” giving religious connotations to the blue sky. In these poems, God feels less like a historical individual than a force or a feeling. When we come across something in Clare’s poetry that exceeds the limits of ordinary existence, we can read this as the presence of God. For example, in “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb,” Clare describes love as the one thing that does not succumb to the world’s mortality. Similarly, in “Autumn,” the speaker is overwhelmed by the beauty of the world at sunset, and states that in the golden light he finds “Eternity.” Yet these encounters with God are still prompted by the familiar English countryside: though God is in some sense bigger than the world, for Clare he is also contained by it.
Country Tradition
Clare’s early poetry defied Romantic norms by describing country traditions and ways of life as well as the natural world. In his time, he was often referred to as the “peasant poet” because he was born to a family of field laborers and worked on farms himself from the age of 12. His upbringing made him familiar with sports, traditions, and ways of life that were in the process of disappearing in a rapidly industrializing England. For example, in “The Badger,” he describes the sport of badger baiting, in which people captured a badger and forced it to fight with dogs until it died. The practice was banned as animal cruelty in the early nineteenth century, soon after Clare wrote the poem. However, despite Clare’s love for animals, he does not outright condemn the practice himself. Instead, he depicts it from an objective distance, dwelling more on the excitement of the fight and the badger’s noble persistence than the inherent unfairness of the competition or the frivolous nature of the violence. Much of Clare’s second book, The Village Minstrel, is devoted to similar poems describing country sports and practices, perhaps partially to preserve them when they were no longer part of daily life.
Community
Growing up in the rural village of Helpstone, Clare was part of a strong community. Land was held in common, and many parts of life required collaboration, from vital economic activities like gathering the harvest to entertainments like badger-baiting. However, industrialization threatened these traditional forms of community. As common lands were enclosed, or seized by landowners, many people lost their way of life and had to immigrate to large cities, which lacked a similar sense of social connection. Clare’s own story was more tragic, as his mental health gradually declined and he was eventually sent to an asylum at the age of 44, where he lived out the rest of his life. There, Clare felt deeply alone, separate both from his childhood social world and the literary community he dabbled in as a young man. His most famous poem “I Am!” depicts the impact this loss of community had on his sense of self. Though modern Westerners tend to prioritize the individual, Clare’s poem suggests that to have a clear sense of self, one must be known and loved by other people. Without this network of connections, he feels lost at sea, not just lonely, but unable to know who he truly is.
Value of the Little Things
Underpinning many of John Clare’s poems is a love for little things, especially in the natural world. “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” is part of a series of poems about different birds’ nests. Much of the poem is devoted to describing the details of the nest, including what kinds of sticks it is made of. The speaker invites the reader to stoop down with him to see the nest, blocking out the rest of the world in favor of paying attention to a tiny natural object. Another well-known poem, “Clock a Clay,” describes the world of a ladybug. Clare depicts the world from her perspective, with the grass becoming a forest and a “pillar” “green and tall.” Similarly, in “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” an old molehill becomes a mountain to the warbler who sits atop it and sings for his mate. Both “Clock a Clay” and “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” transport the reader to another world, not by describing a strange or unfamiliar landscape, but by imagining how our world would seem to much smaller creatures. Clare’s capacity for empathy with non-human animals combines with his willingness to pay attention to them to suggest that our way of experiencing the world is neither universal nor uniquely valid.
Animal Personhood
When John Clare writes about animals, he consistently gets inside their head. In “The Badger,” he depicts the titular creature as a kind of epic hero, who persists through a brutal fight despite being outmatched. When the badger finally dies, Clare lingers with the moment as one might with the death of a tragic hero on stage, noting the sounds he makes and his final gasp of breath. Similarly, in “The Yellowhammer’s Nest,” Clare makes the warbler the hero of the poem, interpreting her egg-laying as a form of poetry, and imagining that, should her young be killed by a snake, she would grieve for them as a human being would grieve. Neither of these poems are environmentalist in the sense of conveying a moral about how human beings should treat the natural world. However, they challenge our anthropocentrism, or the assumption that human beings are the most important creatures in the world, by extending empathy to animals.
Love
Love is an important theme in John Clare’s poetry in a variety of ways. First, he is well known for his traditional love poetry, primarily addressed to his childhood crush Mary Joyce. These poems are often somewhat generic, as they replicate the conventions of love poetry in the period. His poem “First Love” is an exception, because it depicts the feeling of falling in love as a violent and awe-inspiring process ending in a lost sense of self. However, Clare was also interested in non-romantic love. Many of his poems about the natural world, especially his sonnets, describe himself “loving” to see or go out in the countryside. The sonnet was traditionally associated with love poetry, as Clare would have known given his interest in older poetry. By using the form to profess his love for the natural world, he suggested that those feelings were just as profound as the love of one person for another. Finally, he sometimes wrote about love in a more abstract sense, using the word almost as a stand-in for God. We get a sense of this in “First Love,” which depicts love as a radical break with ordinary experience which transcends the limits of the self. He gets more explicit in “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb,” which depicts love as something that can be seen and heard in the beauty of the natural world, yet simultaneously outlives the mortality of things on earth.
