THE CASE OF JOHN CLARE

Lying asleep in my bed,
And supposedly absent from care,
I never expected my head
Would consider the case of John Clare.

But there he was, stood at the window,
The face of a ghost in the glass,
His breath like the mist from a meadow
And his mouth green-stained with the grass.

I sat up and probably started
As he looked in such dreadful repair.
“Now friend, don’t be frit nor faint-hearted,
“Tis only my sen,” says John Clare.”

Some of his words sounded foreign
And I couldn’t grasp them at all;
Many I’m sure I’ve forgotten,
But these are the ones I recall.

“Only my sen in a slop frock
“And toltering more than I’m stepping,
“Lying with the lungwort at Baldock,
“North from the mad-house at Epping.

“I’ll write and explain to the governor
“The reasons for my escape.
“He’s not a bad man for a southerner
“But I had to be gone from his keep.”

“I come up by Enfield and Potton
“Between the land and the sky
“And while our estate may be rotten
“There’s fine long nights in July.

“I fancied myself as a pooty
“Under his shell on the sward
“Or a bee flye Sleeping Beauty
“In the heath-bell’s purple hood.”


I say: “But John Clare you’ve been well gone,
“They strangled the voice of your brook,
“They buried your body at Helpstone
“And bound your poor life in a book.”

“But I dreamed,” says John Clare, “in my dozing,
“I dreamed that the Acts were repealed
“And the manors were done with enclosing
“And I became free, with the fields.

“The Earth was contrarily turning
“And the landless joyfully roared
“Like an exiled army returning
“To the country’s commons restored.

“Then I woke in a creep of the hedge
“To the chittering throstle’s song.
“A man says ‘This one’s on the edge,
“ ‘I know him from Northborough, Mad John.

“ ‘He roves like a Jack o’ Lantern
“ ‘With a mind that is here and then gone.
“ ‘He’s the fribbling fool of Northampton,
“ ‘The scribbling lunatic John.’

“See, they have it my sanity’s undone
“And gone like the game to the wood
“Yet I’ve met de Quincey in London,
“And Coleridge and Hazlitt and Hood.

“And they never could hold my attention,
“Not all of these cleverest of men
“Like the dilacet hue of the gentian
“Or the frost along Peterborough Fen.

“It may be their mighty rhymes
“Are given down from the Gods
“While my poor shanny chimes
“Are kicked direct from the clods.

“And well may you say I’m ungainly
“And Bedlam Cowslip pale
“So I’ll set it out stoutly and plainly:
“The land’s being turned to a jail.”

I say: “But John Clare that’s absurd
“For this is the England still
“Of Cobden and Wilkes and Wordsworth
“And John Stuart Liberty Mill.”

“And there,” says John Clare, “is the cavill
“Since all should know better today
“Than engage in a war so uncivil
“As all should be prisoned away.

“They’ve squared off the plains with fences
“And morts of the mountains and moors
“And invented a range of offences
“That sends innocence out of doors.

“The mole shall be hanged for the treason
“Of forgetting the name of the king
“And the redcap tried for no reason
“Beyond the compulsion to sing,

“And all shall be taken as transports
“In their once familiar place
“And tread shall be turned to trespass
“And the glass to a stranger’s face.”

“And even as England is sleeping
“The axe and the chain and the drain
“ Will make Whittlesea and West Deeping
“As foreign as Boney’s domain.

“So look your last on the     nation
“Before she’s around you vanished
“And her unborn generations
“Unnaturally self-banished.

“You may say that I’m all disordered
“And my body swinkt and frail
“And I’d best go unrecorded
“Like the perishing of a quail

“And stop my mouth from murder
“And get my dossity gone
“At least for ten miles further
“Up the York Road that I’m on.”

The matter of misplacement
Weighed heavily on him, I’d say,
Like a creature caught in the casement
And having to be away.

Then he stepped back from the sill
And into the end of the night,
Muttering mouthfuls still,
Corpse-candle thin in the light.

Made, like his name, from the clay
But reverting into air –
“And that’s all I have to say;
“No more from me,” says John Clare.

I went to the churchyard at Helpston
Where they’ve honoured him in his trade
With the words carved into his gravestone:
“A poet is born not made.”

The rain and the lychen together
Had eroded an e so it read
As edited by the weather:
“Born not mad” instead.

It looked a little neglected
And I didn’t dawdle there
But found myself, more than expected,
Considering the case of John Clare.