‘Grief Searching Muse’

Romantic poetics of memory and mourning find an unusually lingering attachment to geographic location within John Clare's poetry, ¹ which often comprises a series of intimately recollected natural haunts and is haunted by those past times and rural ways of life that Clare both records and bemoans. ² These re-imagined landscapes of Clare's late poetry, written during his residency at Northampton General Asylum, have been noted for their idealising ‘nostalgic … and haunting’ ³ qualities and the strength of their emotional commitment to a physical sense of place, especially Clare's beloved Helpston village, ‘which mem'ry cherishes’. ⁴ These careful, attentive, poetic representations of rural life have been read as a recuperation of Clare's former freedoms, loves, and identity through a compensatory reconstruction of idealised landscapes of love. ⁵ This emotional attachment to, and investment, in his surroundings has led to claims that Clare's poetry is marred by overly sentimental and excessive descriptions of nature. ⁶ This perceived weakness 132of Clare's poetry, in fact, is one of his greatest strengths as a poet. The chapter explores how Clare's close observations of the minutiae of natural processes and transience of existence remind us that landscapes of love readily translate into landscapes of mourning. ⁷ After all love is, as Clare was acutely aware, inextricably bound up with loss, grief, and mourning. ⁸ Take for instance, Clare's suggestive imaging of love, in a poem of that name, as ‘the star in night's darkness’ ⁹ which illuminates, and is engulfed by, the blackness. This transient sense of love and life, as Clare writes in ‘Edward's Grave’, is the cause of ‘heartfelt grief’ ¹⁰ and a powerful elegiac emotion that remains a persistent presence throughout Clare's mature poetry. Such ‘heartfelt grief’ marks out Clare's writing as a profound site of loss which, attuned to the effects of natural and social change, gauges the passage of time, lost youth, and the sweeping away of age-old agricultural practices and customs. Clare's early prose reflections on the pleasures of childhood attest to this relentless march of time and its devastating effects, but also implicate poetry in the processes of ageing and lost innocence:

There is nothing but poetry about the existance of childhood real simple soul moving poetry the laughter and the joy of poetry and not its philosophy and there is nothing of poetry about manhood but the reflection and the remembrance of what has been nothing more Thus it is that our play prolonging moon on spring evenings shed a richer lustre than the midday sun that surrounds us now in manhood for its poetical sunshine hath left us now it is the same identical sun and we have learned to know that … there is nothing of that new and refreshing sunshine upon the picture now it shines from the heavens upon real matter of fact existances and weary occupations. ¹¹