I want to look at a group of poems that seem to me to epitomise Clare's ‘Independent Spirit’ as a self-taught poet: they have long been known, considered and admired (by radical critics, at least) as a group, but it took Johanne Clare, in her fine study John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance, to give them a name that would stick: the enclosure elegies.

My interest in them is the way that Clare draws together popular and literary materials in their construction, especially the way he draws on rather unpromising material such as scripture, or pastoral poetry and, showing the characteristic eclecticism of the self-taught tradition, creates from them powerful new means of poetical and political expression. I am particularly intrigued by the way Clare ‘turns’ ideas and phrases from eighteenth-century pastoral poetry—a tradition still widely (if unfairly) regarded as insipid—into newly energised verse. In this I suppose he resembles the yellowhammer of his poem ‘The Yellowhammer's Nest’, building its nest from leftovers:

                                                                                …’tis rudely planned
Of bleached stubbles and the withered fare
That last year's harvest left upon the land
Lined thinly with the horse's sable hair

(Summerfield, p. 104)

Those who see Clare as an ecological prophet will have noticed that this is a perfect ‘natural’ example of what we are nowadays pleased to call recycling. The poet moves on in the next line from nature's recycling to the writing techniques of ‘nature's poesy’ (‘Five eggs penscribbled over lilac shells / Resembling writing, scrawls’): and we shall also be looking at something that puts these two ideas together, at a kind of literary recycling, in which all sorts of apparently unpromising strands from earlier literary harvests are woven together into these most focused and poignant, these most wrought political protest poems.

I want to work sequentially, and we may begin by looking at some of the opening shots in Clare's war against the enclosures, fired off even as the enclosure of Helpstone was taking place. There are signs of sensibility-influenced righteous anger in ‘Helpstone’, the first poem of Clare's first volume and a homage to Oliver Goldsmith's famous poetical lament for a lost rural idyll, The Deserted Village (1770). In this early poem, ‘accursed wealth’ is the familiarly personified addressee and subject of indignation:

Oh who could see my dear green willows fall
What feeling heart but dropt a tear for all
Accursed wealth o’er bounding human laws
Of every evil thou remainst the cause
Victims of want those wretches such as me
Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee
Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed
And thine our loss of labour and of bread
Thou art the cause that levels every tree
And woods bow down to clear a way for thee

(Williams, p. 28).

This is rather awkward and derivative in some obvious ways, but it is also intriguing in that it shows the way the poet is beginning to draw together his resources for the great verse-battle. Here we have plain language, the language of prayer and scripture (particularly in the lamenting ‘thine our loss of labour and of bread’), set against the mock-heroic Popean conceit by which ‘woods bow down to clear a way for thee’. Somewhere between these two extremes of tone we have the sense of indignation (‘Accurs’d wealth’), the appeal to natural justice (‘human laws’), and the ‘feeling heart’ and tearfulness that are the clear characteristics of sensibility poetry. Clare begins to develop his own forms of political-poetical rhetoric here; for example in the repetition of ‘wretches … wretchedness’, and in the absolutes of ‘levels every tree’ (a phrase we shall meet again in ‘Remembrances’—incidentally, we shall also meet ‘too truly’ again, at the end of ‘The Mores’).

Another such moment of verse-protest appears in stanza 107 of ‘The Village Minstrel’, the title poem of Clare's second collection, published in 1821. Clare's evangelical patron Lord Radstock—clearly a person who would nowadays be counting the number of swear words on TV—was so incensed by stanza 107 that he scrawled across the manuscript ‘This is radical slang’. He was quite right, too:

107

There once was lanes in natures freedom dropt
There once was paths that every valley wound
Inclosure came & every path was stopt
Each tyrant fixt his sign where pads was found
To hint a trespass now who crossd the ground
Justice is made to speak as they command
The high road now must be each stinted bound
—Inclosure thourt a curse upon the land
& tastless was the wretch who thy existence pland

(Early Poems, II, 170).

Many of the rhetorical ingredients that would go to make up the later enclosure elegies, poems like ‘The Mores’, are already in place here, and we may note what some of them are. We have the rhetoric of story-telling, for a start, repeated for good measure:

There once was lanes in natures freedom dropt
There once was paths that every valley wound

The pattern of the verse, and the sounds of the poetry—whispering sibilants followed in each line by open and varying vowels (‘every valley wound’)—emulate the wandering freedoms on which the poet reminisces, just as surely as the word ‘stopt’ emulates the sudden cessation it expresses (in ‘The Mores’ this is made even more dramatic, as the phrase ‘These paths are stopt’ pulls us up dead in mid-line). The villain now emerges, the semi-personified ‘Inclosure’, accompanied by his army of tyrants, all busily blocking off the ‘pads’ or paths the poet has celebrated in the earlier lines. Insidiously, a trespass is ‘hinted’ to the path-users: this is the velvet glove, so to speak, but within a line the iron fist is revealed: ‘Justice is made to speak as they command’, which is to say the enclosers own the magistracy. One does not have to look too deeply into the Trespass laws of the time, or at Clare's deep anxieties about being caught trespassing, to understand the anger and dismay, the fear and loathing, that smokes off the poetry here.

We are to be restricted to the high road where we can be safely seen (the sound-pattern of the phrase ‘each stinted bound’ nicely suggests meanness and restriction), and the stanza is concluded with a curse in the penultimate line, and a condemnation that fills the final line, using the hexameter to extend and meander:

—Inclosure thourt a curse upon the land
& tastless was the wretch who thy existence pland

The effect is almost of an aside (note the dash), and the wandering final alexandrine subtly implies that the poet is weary with the whole business: a rhetorical posture, no doubt, but an effective one.

In ‘Helpstone’ the spoilers were ‘accursed’. Here they are ‘a curse’, and we are reminded in both cases that it is the poet's ancient prerogative to curse what is wicked as well as to praise what is good. (Clare learned this perhaps from Thomas Gray's ‘Bard’, hurling defiance down onto the English king from his Welsh mountain: Gray was an early favourite for Clare.) How interesting in another way is the fact that the curse against the enclosurists should be made in terms of their bad taste: ‘tastless was the wretch who thy existence pland’. For Clare ‘taste’, the realm of the aesthetic, is also the realm of the political, and vice versa.

The rhetorical strategies here are much more sophisticated than in ‘Helpstone’, but they also maintain their sense of democratic accessibility. One hates to say it of a poet who spent so many Sundays bunking off with the gypsies during ‘church time’, and so often condemned the humbug of clergymen, but Clare seems to have learned a great deal from the techniques of scripture and the sermon, which were perhaps the most common combinations of the rhetorically-wrought and the verbally-accessible available to him.

The ‘Lamentations of Round Oak Waters’ was again written very early, in 1818, when Clare was about 25, bursting to get on the poetry scene, and full of anger and grief at the enclosure of Helpstone, now almost completed. Like ‘Helpstone’ (but less transparently derivative) it is clearly prentice work, but it is very good prentice work, and in it, again, we can see Clare gathering together his poetical resources, particularly the combination of literary and popular materials that is so characteristic of his best writing.

We start the poem with a presentation of what we understand to be the poet's own situation, as he takes himself to Round Oak Waters, a local stream:

Oppress’d wi’ grief a double share
                    Where Round oak waters flow
I one day took a sitting there
                    Recounting many a woe
My naked seat without a shade
                    Did cold and blealy shine
Which fate was more agreable made
                    As sympathising mine
The wind between the north and East
                    Blow’d very chill and cold
Or coldly blow’d to me at least
                    My cloa’hs were thin and old
The grass all dropping wet wi dew
                    Low bent their tiney spears
The lowly daise’ bended too
                    More lowly wi my tears
(For when my wretched state appears
                    Hurt friendless poor and starv’d
I never can withhold my tears
                    To think how I am sarv’d
To think how money’d men delight
                    More cutting then the storm
To make a sport and prove their might
                    O’ me a fellow worm)
With arms recline’d upon my knee
                    In mellancholly form
I bow’d my head to misery
                    And yielded to the storm
And there I fancied uncontrould
                    My sorrows as they flew
Unnotic’d as the waters rowl’d
                    Where all unnoticed too

(Williams, pp. 78-9)

The poet's stance is familiar in a number of ways. Firstly it is biblical: Leonora Nattrass's paper explains how and why this is so, so I shall not tread on her toes. Instead I shall consider other sources. Firstly we have the tradition of thwarted love, associated in Renaissance poetry with the Petrarchan sonnet. From this tradition Clare derives the persona of the melancholy youth setting himself apart from the world and sharing his sorrows with nature. Then we have two eighteenth-century traditions. There is a tradition of philanthropic protest poetry, deriving from Shaftesburian ideas of human sympathy and the literary movement known as sensibility. This poetry habitually sympathises with the victims of rural poverty, and shows indignation towards its unfeeling creators. Goldsmith's ‘The Deserted Village’ and Crabbe's ‘The Village’ are obvious variants on the theme, both hugely influential on Clare. In Clare's period, rather melodramatic philanthropic protest poetry on the subject of rural poverty was being produced by poets such as Samuel Jackson Pratt, in his Sympathy or a Sketch of the Social Passions (1781), and Cottage Pictures of the Poor (1801). It is worth remembering, too, that Clare was an early and alert admirer of a much more substantial poet of rural sympathy—William Wordsworth—though it is not clear whether he knew Wordsworth's poetry as early as 1818. The philanthropic, sensibility tradition is signalled especially in Clare's use of words like ‘fate’ (line 7), ‘sympathising’ (line 8), ‘friendless’ (l. 19), and ‘melancholy’ (l. 26). These are the kinds of poignant abstractions beloved of ‘sensibility’ poets.

The other eighteenth-century element is signalled by the fact that these opening stanzas are cast in the first person. The philanthropic tradition, however sympathetic, was always something bestowed on the sufferer from the outside. But here we have a first person narrative, where the sufferer has authorial control. It reflects, I think, the tradition (itself originating in folktale and folksong) by which the self-taught poet—in eighteenth-century parlance, the Uneducated or Peasant Poet—would include in his or her volume of poems a preface highlighting the educational and economic disadvantages under which they had been written. In Clare's case, Taylor did this for him, writing just such a Preface for the 1820 volume, but more usually the poet him or herself would write this narrative. The plight of the narrator-poet in the opening stanzas of ‘The Lamentation of Round Oak Waters’ is not very closely specified, but there are some details suggesting poverty, such as ‘My cloa’hs were thin and old’ (l. 12); and the way the ‘money’d men delight’ (l. 21) in triumphing over this ‘Shun’d Son of Poverty’ (as the personified stream calls him at line 38). Looking at Clare's life in 1818, and at the combination of literary elements in these opening stanzas, one would venture that his hostility to enclosure and the ‘moneyed men’ behind it, are very much tied to frustration at his poverty and at his exclusion from the literary world, which he felt was caused by his poverty.

So he tells it to the stream, the sacred waters. In the literary pastoral elegy (Milton's Lycidas, Gray's Elegy) the landscape itself, Nature, seems to share the poet's sadness and seems to react in melancholy ways. So indeed it is here, where the ‘nakedness’ of the seat by the water, the coldness, and the chill north-east wind all harmonise with the poet's sense of exclusion, poverty and wretchedness. Where there is vegetation, the grass is wet, and threatens the poet with its ‘tiney spears’. But it also sympathises with him by bending low, as the daisies also do (lines 13-16). The nakedness, the lack of vegetation is especially characteristic. Judging by Clare's poems, the enclosure of Helpstone seems to have involved the stripping away of a great deal of vegetation; at any rate you can see the motif of barren and bare land recurring in the enclosure elegies. (It is a theme that is very familiar to us in the twentieth century, from First World War imagery to contemporary fears about ecological disaster.) Clare's sources are literary as well as from nature, and he would later draw wasteland images from Keats's poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, with its melancholy imagery of cold hillside, withered sedge, and barren land.

Nature usually sympathises then, in this kind of writing—but it doesn’t very often answer back. One gets a glimpse of Clare's inventiveness in the way he makes it do so here, especially in the transitional moment around line 30. Thinking himself unobserved, the narrator gives vent to tears at his plight—tears are a central fetish and a cathartic goal in sensibility literature, which has something in common with the ‘talking cure’ of modern psychotherapy. But he is not unobserved; the stream hears his woes, and speaks to him, in a piece of poetic invention that goes beyond the normal limits of eighteenth-century personification. This art of making the landscape speak is a technique Clare will use to great effect in ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’.

The rest of the poem is the speech of the ‘genius of the brook’ (l. 45), the spirit of the stream. The poem shows a weakness for melodrama characteristic of sensibility writing: exclamations, moral posturings, and so on. The strength—and I think even at this early stage in Clare's career it far outweighs the weakness—lies in a mythical, almost heroic presentation of the story of a paradise lost. The ballad metre, using the double-verses which we also see in ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, carries this monologue very well, and is a good example of the way Clare melds popular and literary traditions. John Lucas in his new book on Clare makes the point that the double-verse common metre in this poem represents not only the popular tradition, but specifically the politicised popular tradition of the period, widely used by radical writers (pp. 17-18). It is in one respect a sign of Clare's lack of confidence at this stage that he must displace the telling of his story of bereavement and loss onto the stream within this dialogue (though it is fortuitous in its results, as we have seen): his own narrative persona in the poem can only weep and listen, as the mature voice of Nature tells the story for him. In the later enclosure elegies we shall hear the poet's voice, and even the poet's righteous anger, without this displacement; and the one time that it is displaced, it is in a more assured and purposeful way, as we shall see.

The telling of one's sorrows to the waters is redolent of scripture, but we should at least note in passing that it is also an ancient folkloric, indeed a Celtic practice. It goes hand in hand with the worship of trees, which brings us to ‘Langley Bush’, a slightly later poem, written between 1819 and 1821. Robert Graves in The White Goddess described an ancient literary grammar of tree-worship and tree-symbolism, one which occasionally surfaces (along with other traces of Goddess-worship) in the modern literary tradition. Clare seems to me to have the ancient reverence for trees, and ‘Langley Bush’ reflects this. It also reinforces the idea of a particular place being intrinsically significant, and having value for reasons that are not economic (a heresy then, as now):

O Langley bush the shepherds sacred shade
Thy hollow trunk oft gaind a look from me
Full many a journey oer the heath ive made
For such like curious things I love to see
What truth the story of the swain alows
That tells of honours which thy young days knew
Of ‘langley court’ being kept beneath thy boughs
I cannot tell—thus much I know is true
That thou art reverenced even the rude clan
Of lawless gipseys drove from stage to stage
Pilfering the hedges of the husband man
Leave thee as sacred in thy withering age
Both swains and gipseys seem to love thy name
Thy spots a favourite wi the smutty crew
And soon thou must depend on gipsey fame
Thy mulldering trunk is nearly rotten thro …

(Williams, pp. 54-5).

Langley Bush is an old and rotten tree, therefore of no economic or practical value. The shepherds, ‘swains’ and gipsies are the ones who value it, i.e. people whose opinions about the landscape (whether aesthetic or economic) are generally counted for nothing in the official scheme of things. Langley Bush's value is partly based on (or at least, is validated by) ancient history: the folk memory of ‘Langley court’ mentioned in the poem (line 7), meaning the old hundred court of Nassaburgh which, according to the Tibbles, went back to Saxon times, and was held under its boughs. All the ingrained, ancient values locked into the land and represented here by the tree are being swept aside in the drive for profit; but Clare strives to draw attention to alternative values that the tree might represent. These are unmeasurable values, represented by the ‘love’ that gypsies and swains feel for the very name of the place, and the ‘sacred’ (l. 1), the spiritual resonances Langley Bush has for the gypsies and others. Langley Bush is valued as the repository of folk memory, including memories of an older system of justice symbolised by Langley Court, and presumably rather different from the current, enclosurist-controlled, magistracy (see the discussion of ‘stanza 107’, above).

In Graves's classic account, the trees each correspond to several other sets of symbols: each has a set of parallel values, including a value in terms of letters of the alphabet. Thus each tree ‘speaks’ or ‘writes’, has a narrative, is part of the story of things. So too does Langley Bush have a story: in fact several stories, Clare hints, including one about an older justice system, and one about youthful ‘honours’, i.e. the worship and presumably the ‘dressing’ of the tree in older times. The truthfulness of the tree's ‘stories’ is not clear to the poet (something is already lost and forgotten). So the tree's significance must be judged by the feel of the place, and more particularly by the feelings it arouses in the poet and in others. The tree's being, for no practical reason, ‘reverencd’ by the shepherds and the gypsies tells its own story in this context, one of an older system of cultural valuations.

The tree itself was destroyed, as Clare knew in the poem it would be, and as indeed he records in his Journal for 29 Sep 1824:

last year Langly bush was destroyd an old white thorn

          that

had stood for more then a century full of fame the Gip

          seys

Shepherds & Herd men all had their tales of its history

          & it

will be long ere its memory is forgotten

(Natural History, p. 183).

Its survival (in a figurative sense, which is the one sense still available) can only be assured by the continued telling of its story/stories, and the preservation of its name, as a beloved representation of the thing itself. Within the poem, it is the oral tradition of shepherds and gypsies which has done this, by seeming to ‘love thy name’. Beyond this, though it is not explicitly stated, it must be the poet—Clare himself—who tells its fame. In this sense the poetry has a redemptive function, to keep ‘Langley Bush’ (or ‘Swordy Well’, or ‘Round Oak Waters’) alive, if only in name: and this is another key theme of the enclosure elegies, to be, in themselves, mementoes (or as Clare would say, ‘Remembrances’) of the lost landscapes. Clare carries out this task as well as it could be done, making a safe haven in his poem for the oral tradition, the telling of stories, the reverencing of trees, the lamentation for lost values and landscapes, and the memory of Langley Bush. He draws together popular and literary materials effectively to do so.

In ‘Helpstone Green’, written around the same period, Clare celebrates the lost values of the village common or green, values particularly associated with childhood and play, as they are in other ‘village green’ poems (Blake's ‘The Ecchoing Green’ comes to mind):

Ye injur’d fields ere while so gay
When natures hand display’d
Long waving rows of Willows gray
And clumps of Hawthorn shade
But now alas your awthorn bowers
All desolate we see
The tyrants hand their shade devours
And cuts down every tree
Not tree's alone have felt their force
Whole Woods beneath them bow’d
They stopt the winding runlets course
And flowrey pastures plough’d
To shrub nor tree throughout thy fields
They no compassion show
The uplifted ax no mercy yields
But strikes a fatal blow

(Williams, p. 71).

The elements of this story are beginning to seem fairly familiar. An injury has been done by a ‘tyrant’, who strips vegetation and destroys nature's plenitude, cutting down ‘every tree’. But again, the generic elements are interestingly mixed. The apostrophe to ‘Ye injur’d fields ere while so gay’ is unmistakably written in the manner of eighteenth-century poetry, but behind the relentless cutting-down going on in these first two stanzas hovers the figure of John Barleycorn: not meaning in this instance (as Clare uses the term) strong beer; but the melancholy story of the annual ritual cutting down of the corn king, celebrated in folksong.

‘To a Fallen Elm’ both celebrates a particular tree, and expresses the values of tree-worship. Here the tree becomes a benevolent overseer of hearth and household, a tutelary god. In the first two verse-paragraphs Clare familiarises the tree as part of a structure of seasonal activity, particularly associated with comfort and leisure. Yet this is not merely cosy pastoral writing: the tree has darkness and danger about it in the opening lines, and an almost sublime effect is sought after.

Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many colored shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness came as it would strangle light
With the black tempest of a winter night
That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root
How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
Thy strength without while all within was mute
It seasoned comfort to our hearts desire
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was never penned
Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower
But change till now did never come to thee
For time beheld thee as his sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree
Storms came and shook thee with a living power
Yet stedfast to thy home thy roots hath been
Summers of thirst parched round thy homely bower
Till earth grew iron—still thy leaves was green
The children sought thee in thy summer shade
And made their play house rings of sticks and stone
The mavis sang and felt himself alone
While in thy leaves his early nest was made
And I did feel his happiness mine own
Nought heeding that our friendship was betrayed

(Williams, pp. 84-5).

Again we have the word ‘sacred’, indicating reverence. In words like ‘cradle’, ‘dower’ and ‘domestic’ there is a feminised perception of the tree, with its loyalty to the home (‘stedfast to thy home’), and its maternal ‘homely bower’ and ‘summer shade’. (It is a male ‘mavis’ or thrush, protected and therefore confident, who sings in its branches and makes a nest). The tree combines its domesticity with heroic qualities; following Thomson, Clare is able to make the turning of the seasons into an epic subject, from the ‘black tempest’ of autumn through ‘summers of thirst’, to the coming of winter (‘earth grew iron’). Clare is clearly employing generic cross-fertilisation between pastoral and epic, and as is usual in the eighteenth-century tradition, it is in the georgic (especially Thomson's Seasons, whose tones are imitated here) that these contrasted literary modes can meet.

That last word of the second stanza, ‘betrayed’ is a dramatic one (‘summer shade’ and ‘nest was made’ hardly prepared us to expect it as a rhyme word), and an important one for Clare, here and elsewhere. He uses the idea of betrayal in other poems, for example in the last section of ‘The Yellowhammers Nest’, where the nest is betrayed by the treacherous snake, in a re-enaction of the Biblical story of the Fall, one of the archetypal myths that lie behind so much of Clare's writing, especially on the subject of enclosure. It is a powerful archetype, and one which, again, Clare learned from the Christian tradition.

The rest of the poem is a kind of honed political rant, ironically setting the betrayers against the image of the tree's impartial gift of shelter:

Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many a shower
That when in power would never shelter thee

(Williams, p. 85).

What is betrayed in the poem is the integrity of nature which the tree seems to represent. Yet it is also the value of verbal integrity: Clare has a very strong sense of language being betrayed, a sense we see again in ‘The Mores’ where ‘A board sticks up to notice “no road here”’ and the birds have to learn to read in order to stay within bounds. For Clare, as for George Orwell, once words like ‘freedom’ are betrayed, then we are on a slippery slope, and words may become suspect or even unusable. ‘Freedom’, here, is indeed ‘slavery’ for Clare and his class. Like personal identity, like sacred places, language is all too easily undermined.

Stylistically we might say that in the second half of the poem Clare raises a rhetorical storm, both to fight fire with fire by outranting and so exposing the false rhetoric of the liberty-crying ranters (who are really only interested in exploitation), and also to match the storm of the first stanza, creating a musical effect: a ‘word-storm’, echoing back at the sublime autumn storm described in the first stanza. Clare learned how to describe (and to verbally construct) melodramatic storms, incidentally, from Thomson's Seasons, that portmanteau of descriptive styles and subjects.

It may seem odd to say that with ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ Clare's anti-enclosure poems reach a new maturity, not only because of the high quality of much of what we have seen already, but also because there is an unfinished quality to it: the title is conjectural, and there is some dispute as to how the manuscripts should be put together to make a coherent poem. John Barrell and John Bull for example, in The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (and following Anne Tibble), discover in the manuscripts a sparer poem, shorter, and in the single four-line verse of ballad metre, with the dramatic declaration ‘Im swordy well a piece of land’ at the start of the poem instead of embedded in the third verse as it is in the Robinson and Powell and the Summerfield version. (I must say I prefer this ‘sparer’ version, but it is not clear that it represents Clare's final intention, and the complexity of the manuscript evidence makes it hard to sort out.)

The poem's maturity, whichever version one looks at, clearly lies in the bold way Clare brings ‘Swordy Well’ to life to tell its story. The personification of Swordy Well is striking, and I think Clare is drawing on popular techniques here such as the creation of human characters out of abstract qualities in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, and the way that characters in folksong (‘John Barleycorn’, for example) and in folk drama announce themselves to their audience. Clare recorded an extract from the Helpston Mummer's Play, and discusses a Mummer's Play in his ‘Letter to William Hone’. There is, in the extract recorded by Clare, a good example of the way characters enter the playing area in Mummer's Plays and declare to the audience who they are:

Here comes I prince George a champion bold
& with my bloody spear I won three crowns of gold

(Deacon, p. 293).

Clare also uses the ballad metre, which is well adapted to direct narrative, and is also effective for a certain kind of self-dramatising monologue, with real confidence here, adapting it effectively to his own characteristic form of elegiac lament for a lost past.

Alongside these popular influences there are, as usual, some more formal literary influences. The beginning of the fourth verse from the end, for example:

There was a time my bit of ground
made freemen of the slave

(Summerfield, p. 177).

clearly echoes Goldsmith's lament in ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770):

                    A time there was, ere England's griefs
began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man

(lines 57-8).

And there are faint echoes of Gray's ‘Elegy’, in the penultimate verse, both in the Gray-like desire to find a friend, and the desire to escape the ‘strife of mongerel men’ (a pithy variant on the ‘madding crowd's ignoble strife’).

The alliteration and assonance of the poem are also outstanding, for example in the fifth verse, with its marvellous sequence of sounds:

The muck that clouts the ploughmans shoe
The moss that hides the stone

(Summerfield, p. 173).

The extraordinary verbal felicity in this kind of construction goes a long way to explaining why even as disciplined a critic as Seamus Heaney can call this ‘one of the best poems of its century’. There is a real strength of description in the poem that this kind of sound-making greatly enhances.

Clare is especially strong in creating empathy with the personified ‘Swordy Well’. He is perhaps just beginning to find the right audience in this respect. Thanks to developments in ecological theory, we are particularly alert to the idea of the ground as a living thing, capable of being wounded by human over-exploitation and our failure to live in balance and harmony with nature. There have been some interesting attempts in recent years by James McKusick and Jonathan Bate to annexe Clare and Wordsworth to the cause of ecology, and proclaim them ‘green’ poets.¹ And certainly Clare's ability to empathise with (and make us empathise with) Swordy Well is remarkable, as is his apparently quite deep understanding that there is more to a piece of ground than just its agricultural and mineral potential.

The final strength of the poem lies in its self-consciousnessness: what Kelsey Thornton, in an essay we wrote together for the John Clare in Context volume, called ‘the art behind Clare's artlessness’. Clare uses the process of telling the story, for example, in a highly conscious way, and with an acute alertness about what it means to encode Swordy Well's narrative. One can see this, for instance, in the sixth verse, where ‘Swordy Well’ says:

Though I’m no man yet any wrong
Some sort of right may seek
& I am glad if e’en a song
Gives me the room to speak

(Summerfield, p. 173).

Even as the poet is making ‘Swordy Well’ admit here, with faux-naif charm, that it is not really a person at all and that this is, after all, just a song, he is also implicitly claiming that the song has significance, and is perhaps the only way to find ‘room to speak’, the only means by which the voice of the wronged can be made to be heard. Swordy Well's story is implicitly significant, and it is the poet's art that can bear witness to the wrong. The last four lines of the poem strongly complete a pattern of survival through testifying:

Yet what with stone pits' delving holes
And strife to buy and sell
My name will quickly be the whole
That’s left of Swordy Well

(p. 178).

The place itself will be gone in a whirlwind of excavation and wheeler-dealing, but it will survive in a more limited form, as a name. It is not stated, but as with ‘Langley Bush’ the one place that it is most likely to survive as a name is in this poem. And one could say that the strategy has worked. There is no ‘Swordy Well’ today, but there are local maps produced by the John Clare Society and by the local tourist authorities that clearly mark its site: and this has all been the result of this poem. Even more to the point there is the poem itself, and the pleasure we can still feel in reading it, reassembling a little bit of Swordy Well each time we do so. Naming, saying and remembering are of course poor compensations for the loss of a place; and that mournful fact is also something Clare shows himself to be well aware of.

Most of what I want to say about ‘The Mores’ is included in the essay I mentioned that Kelsey Thornton and I wrote recently, ‘John Clare: the Trespasser’, and it would be tiresome to those who have read it, to repeat those ideas here. In a nutshell, we felt that in this poem Clare's poetic war against enclosure reached a new level. It is a magnificent, highly-wrought poem in which Clare deploys all the rhetorical powers he can summon, writing himself into the main-stream tradition of English political protest writing, the tradition of Langland, Milton, Swift, Goldsmith, and Crabbe. Enclosure is transformed into the much greater subject of civil rights, ownership and control. The power of its characteristic contrasts between past and present, openness and closure, shadow and substance, are quite exceptional even within the Clarean canon. The word that comes most readily to mind is ‘epic’.

It seems to me that ‘Swordy Well’ and The Mores' are the strongest and finest of Clare's enclosure elegies, and the outcome of many years of development, some of whose milestones we have considered here. ‘The Mores’ was not quite Clare's final word on enclosure, however, though it does seem to represent the last time that he concentrated his poetical resources so intently on the subject. As the poet slid into an increasingly unhappy and unsettled middle age, the crisis of the enclosure of Helpston was superseded by more personal crises, associated with his removal from Helpston to Northborough, leading him in turn to High Beach in Epping Forest, and finally to the Asylum at Northampton. As has often been noted, the Northborough period produced some of his finest poetry, but also his bleakest: poems like ‘The Badger’, where (as Tom Paulin has pointed out) the poet's own rawness and exposure may be traced in the cruelty of village badger-baiting and the blood of the dying badger; and poems like ‘To the Snipe’, where haunted poet and hunted bird seem equally threatened, by rapacious man and unforgiving nature. The three great poems from the beginning of Clare's Northborough period, ‘The Flitting’, ‘Decay’, and ‘Remembrances’, vividly summarise his bleak feelings and sense of loss at the changes of his middle years; and in the last of these we get what is perhaps Clare's last great speech on the enclosures. As with ‘The Badger’, it seems the poet must cast around for a familiar image of violence and brutality, in order to convey the strength of his feeling of anger, betrayal and loss. He finds such an image in the dark days before 1815, when Boney was a bogey-figure and the sight of hanging traitors apparently a common one:

Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors—though the brook is running still
It runs a naked stream cold and chill

(Summerfield, p. 197).

Clare had long known and celebrated moles, as land-shapers working to break up the flatness of the land, little industrial saboteurs throwing up disruptions to the smooth productivity of the enclosed fields (or as Marx would write—alluding lightly to Hamlet's ‘Well said, old mole’—‘We recognise our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well, how to work underground, suddenly to appear: The Revolution’). But in Clare's post-enclosure world the subversives have been caught and executed as traitors, and there will be no revolution.

As with ‘The Lamentation of Round Oak Waters’ we have the image of the bare waters ‘cold and chill’. In his new book John Lucas points out that for Clare nakedness seems to represent ‘a stripping away of all dignity and worth’ (p. 45). I think this is probably true; but it also seems to me to represent nature sterile and un-nurturing, the dark counterpoint to the fecundity and variety of nature Clare celebrates elsewhere in his poetry, and a waste land image, again perhaps more familiar in modern poetry and literature.

One can see in powerful lines like these why the great social historian E. P. Thompson wrote, in his bicentenary comments on Clare, that he ‘conveys with extraordinary sensitivity the ways in which the psychic landscape of the villager was savagely transformed by the enclosure of the commons and open fields’.² It is indeed a psychic landscape that Clare so miraculously conveys in the enclosure elegies, yet one that intimately reflects and refracts a physical landscape, and subtly evokes the individual and his historical and geographical environment.

In brief conclusion, then, I want to suggest that by yoking together in his poetry, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes disharmoniously, elements from a wide range of popular and literary traditions, Clare is able to achieve the vision, the ‘extraordinary sensitivity’ E.P. Thompson saw in his writing. The eclectic and subversive merging of traditions represents a great and often unrecognised strength in Clare and in other self-taught poets like Mary Collier and Robert Bloomfield. It is a topic we would do well to explore—and celebrate—more widely.

Notes

1. See Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), and ‘Romantic Ecology Revisited’, The Wordsworth Circle, 24, no. 3 (1993), 159-62; James C. McKusick, “‘A language that is ever green”: the ecological vision of John Clare’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 61 (1991-92), 226-49. There will be a symposium on Clare and Ecology in the next number of the John Clare Society Journal (no. 14, July 1995), with contributions by Jonathan Bate, W. J. Colletta, and others.

2. E. P. Thompson, [Bicentenary Thoughts], John Clare Society Journal, 12 (1993), p. 31. See also his Customs in Common (1991), pp. 179-84.