[In the following essay, Strickland argues that Clare's “An Invite to Eternity” (probably written in the mid-1840s) is indicative of the power of Clare's “asylum” writings and of the manner in which Clare utilized convention for powerful effect.]

In recent years several critics have re-examined the nature-poetry of John Clare in relation to the eighteenth-century topographical tradition and its Romantic revisions.¹ This has helped to clarify the context of the better part of the “peasant poet's” corpus. But if Thomson and Cowper ranked among Clare's favorite poets, his favorite play was Macbeth, which he claims to have read “about 20 times,”² and this predilection, along with his years of ballad-collecting, perhaps bears more strongly on the preternatural poems of his twenty-three year confinement in St. Andrew's County Lunatic Asylum. Despite the valuable upsurge of critical interest in the descriptive poetry, the later visionary works remain for many of us Clare's most notable achievements. We may be intrigued by the first but haunted by the second, this reflecting our response to the very different poetic personae of the self-tutored “village minstrel” and the obsessed madman. Ultimately both are perhaps as much literary anomalies as major poets, but the earlier Clare is a curiosity of a cultural sort, the later an archetypal.

Of what precisely does Clare become a living emblem in his confinement? First of all, of the poet martyred to his art. As he informed Agnes Strickland in August 1860 with the poignant directness that characterizes so many of his statements, “Literature has destroyed my head and brought me here.”³ In his confinement “in the land of Sodom where all the peoples brains are turned the wrong way”⁴ the retreat of the post-Romantic artist from a progressively brutalized society is raised to the next power, albeit Clare's retreat was involuntary. The otherworldliness of Rossetti's obsession with the image of Beatrice is mirrored, perhaps in a cracked glass, in Clare's monomaniacal reminiscences of Mary Joyce, the “first wife” of his fantasy. Just as his ploughman's experience, and description, of raw nature reveals much landscape poetry, fashionable and greater, as nature glimpsed from between blinders or through a Claude-glass,⁵ so his late poems return us to the High Romantics recalling Lamb's admonition “Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!”

But there is more to the almost numinous attraction of the later Clare than his incarnation of literary archetypes. In the terrible delusions about his youthful love, the tormented Clare embodies that element of ourselves which, perhaps accommodating itself functionally to reality while remaining imaginatively disengaged from it, displaces the desire for fulfilment from afterlife (or social millenium) to an equally wishfulfilling vision of the past. The shallowest form of this is nostalgia; more powerful is a repetition-compulsion of reminiscence; in Clare's obsession, however, we have nothing less than the transformation, the re-writing as it were, of his own past—a process that simultaneously transforms Clare himself. He becomes, ultimately, not only the archetype of the lover unrequited either by his love or reality itself, but of a romantic Adam banished from the Eden of his erotic fancy.⁶ Yet if Clare comes to appear a kind of primal victim, a complementary side of his personality, and of human perseverance generally, is displayed in his at once farcical and somehow heroic identification of himself with prizefighters of the day, conflated with one of his literary idols and alter egos in the description of himself as “Boxer Byron” who never backed down from a fight. A complex pathos is evident here, as in Christopher Smart's recounting of his alcohol-inspired public prayer as “I praised the Lord in St. James Park till I routed all the company.” For both proclamations, penned in madhouses of different centuries, boast of victory amid quite catastrophic defeat, and if in that defeat we find an image of our own condemnation to the tragic condition of being human, in the boasting we may recognize written large the various forms of vain self-bolstering, public or internal, to which we resort to survive that condition, relatively speaking, intact.

The figure of the later Clare is more imposing than the sum of those poems, letters and utterances in which he gives voice to the various archetypes he personifies. Among the visionary poems, “I Am” represents Clare the social and erotic exile longing for his paradise lost. In “A Vision” this defeat is qualified—or rather subsumed—by the bizarre and structurally disjointed assertion of apocalyptic triumph in the last six lines. But in “An invite to Eternity,” probably written, like the others, in the mid-1840s, Clare more subtly and cogently unites the sense of utter desolation with the assertion of a singularly desperate will-to-power.

As unique a poem as “An invite to Eternity” is, its generic conventions are venerable. The “invitation” may even be considered a lyric sub-genre, in which the poet traditionally addresses his beloved in an effort of amorous persuasion amid a natural setting. Perhaps the most famous invitations in English are Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” and Herrick's “Corinna's Going A-Maying,” yet proceeding backwards chronologically we find such celebrated lyrics as Jonson's “Come, my Celia, let us prove,” Marlowe's “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” and several songs of John Dowland (e.g., in his First Booke of Songs of 1597 numbers XI, “Come away, Come Sweet Love,” and XVII, “Come again, Sweet Love doth now Invite).” Wordsworth adapted the convention to non-amorous ends in the early “To My Sister” and “The Tables Turned.” Clare himself wrote many conventional invitations, from the early ballad “Winter's gone, the summer breezes” to the Northborough poem “With Garments Flowing” to the asylum poems “’Tis April and the morning, love” and that entitled “The Invitation.” probably composed five years after “An invite to Eternity”:

Come hither, my dear one, my choice one, and rare one,
And let us be walking the meadows so fair,
Where pilewort and daisies in light and gold blazes,
And the wind plays so sweet in thy bonny brown hair.(7)

The first two lines of “An invite to Eternity” introduce the poem in a similar vein, and could have served to begin another of the same sort, or a folk-song equivalent like “Wild Mountain Thyme”:

Wilt thou go with me sweet maid
Say maiden wilt thou go with me.(8)

Yet when the itinerary of his voyage is revealed, the convention is transformed.

Through the valley depths of shade
Of night and dark obscurity
Where the path hath lost its way
Where the sun forgets the day
Where there’s nor life nor light to see
Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me.

The landscape painted in these lines sends us back to the opening with different ears. The chiastic repetition of the opening, which at first appears delightfully lyrical, now sounds ominous in its insistence, the apostrophe to the “sweet maid” darkly, even diabolically, ironic. Expecting the usual invitation to go a-Maying, we are plunged instead into a bewitched world of darkness visible. In an early poem Clare spoke of his childhood initiation into this realm by the magical folk-tales told him by his mother, and “An invite to Eternity” is on one level a kind of existential version of the “animistic fancy” John and Anne Tibble noted as essential to the “northern fairy-tale” tradition Clare inherited like Burns and others.⁹

It is perhaps because of his exposure to Faerie at so impressionable an age that Clare felt most at home with Macbeth of Shakespeare's plays. Another tributary to the witchcraft that flows through “An invite to Eternity” is the ballad-tradition, Clare himself having been a post-Percy pre-Child collector of ballads.¹⁰ In this first stanza Clare combines the ontological vacancy of his own confinement with the animism of folk-art. The path is not merely lost (cf. Inferno, I, 3) but “hath lost its way”; the sun is not merely eclipsed but “forgets the day.” This is not an indifferent nature drained of vitality but a vaguely inimical one involved in something like unconscious conspiracy against the poet. This element of nature's antagonism to man continues in the next stanza:

Where stones will turn to flooding streams
Where plains will rise like ocean waves
Where life will fade like visioned dreams
And mountains darken into caves
Say maiden wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity
Where parents live and are forgot
And sisters live and know us not.

Analyzing Clare's creative swerve from the panoramic or telescopic technique of the Denham tradition, Timothy Brownlow suggests that Clare's nature poetry adopts a “kinetic and microscopic” viewpoint rather, or “could be called kaleidoscopic (it is not concerned with distancing but with comprehensiveness, a circular all-at-oneness).”¹¹ In this very achievement are the roots of the pathological intensity achieved later in “An invite to Eternity” and to a lesser extent others among the asylum poems. In the hallucinated stanza just quoted kinetic perspective takes on an awesome potency. The volatility of Clare's “all-at-oneness” of viewpoint becomes incorporated by matter itself, the comprehensive effluence of the nature-poet's visionary capability transmutted into, or projected onto, given reality. In Blake's words “the Eye altering alters all.” As in the asylum landscapes of Van Gogh, the terrible energy and instability of the artist's psyche divests external reality of its autonomous objectivity and infuses it with its own sense of vertiginous mutability. In this visionary reversal both Van Gogh and Clare invert an impressionistic aesthetic into something proto-expressionist or surrealist. The same process is at work in ms. 110, stanza “2” of the asylum poems, in which valleys are similarly metamorphosed into waves.¹²

Whereas the traditional invitation landscape is a kind of erotic benediction of natural flux—the rebirth of vitality in the animal and vegetative celebrations of the vernal scene—here the progression is not from frozen winter to vibrant spring but from the fixedness of external nature to the frenzy of hallucination. Vision is experienced as an assault. In an awful complementarity with the liquefaction of stones and plains, the dark air undergoes a petrifaction—darkness becomes not only visible but tangible. In this Ulro-like state the ego is paralyzed in face of visionary assault by erstwhile-solid objects become emanations of raw energy. Nature literally rises against the poet as his will contracts in the unchosen eremitism of his “non-identity.” The cave is a symbol of Clare's visionary disorientation as much as his physical confinement.

The last quatrain of the stanza modulates into the more personal element of the poet's devastation, the sense of radical solitude of literal unfamiliarity of the inner death he explores in the second half of the poem.

Say maiden wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be
To live in death and be the same
Without this life or home or name
At once to be and not to be
That was and is not—yet to see
Things pass like shadows—and the sky
Above, below, around us lie.
The land of shadows wilt thou trace
And look nor know each others face
The present mixed with reasons gone
And past and present all as one
Say maiden can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead
Then trace thy footsteps on with me
We’re wed to one eternity.

What is striking about the third stanza is the relative abnegation of imagery as the poet attempts to describe rather than depict his desolation. This more discursive than imagistic section of the work is disjointed allusively as much as syntactically. Just as the second quatrain opens with the vaguely referential subordinate clause “That was and is not,” so the echoes of earlier writers approach in their imprecise citation something like a desperate reliance on remembered snatches of poetry to articulate the ineffable. It is perhaps not indefensible to read that stanza as Clare's premonition of the modernist plight of Eliot attempting to structure the desolation of his later age with the poetry of allusion. These fragments I have shored against my ruin: the echoes of Coleridge's Rime and “Epitaph” in “death of life” and “live in death”; of Hamlet in “to be and not to be”; and of the last line of Shelley's Alastor in the disruptively inserted “That was and is not.”

There is another sort of disjunction—i.e., of rhyme scheme—as we enter the third stanza. The first two stanzas follow the model ababccdd; the third and fourth shift to aabbccdd. Apart from this change of course, it seems noteworthy that the first two stanzas are themselves asymmetrical. Rather than octets they are conceived as pairs of quatrains, first abab, second aabb. Clare is writing, essentially, in variant ballad stanzas, yoked in pairs somewhat arbitrarily—a situation which becomes particularly evident when syntax breaks down in (double-) stanza three. The tension between invitation address and ballad supernaturalism noted earlier is further reflected structurally in the use of the former's traditional tetrameter and the covert stanzaic form of the latter.

Clare transforms his poem into a darkly parodic epithalamion at the work's conclusion. “Wed to one eternity” culminates a process of physical and chronological breakdown. Just as the marriage ceremony traditionally symbolizes social cohesion and elemental fecundity, so this insane marriage becomes the crowning symbol of a confounding rather than communion of identities. After the loss of all bearings in the nightmarish vertigo depicted at the conclusion of stanza three, matter itself becomes insubstantial. “The land of shadows wilt thou trace”—the verb suggesting not only to measure but to hunt down.¹³ In this impossible parody of a quest all distinctions are blurred. The past is as the present. The living are as the dead. Even the loss of the first person in “each others face” suggests the annihilation of identity. It is difficult to share the Tibbles' belief that this eternity is “the eternity of poetry,” which “besides being a compensation for his present neglect and isolation, is yet something other than the orthodox ‘better world’ of happiness beyond the grave.”¹⁴ The last clause is self-evident, but is not Clare's eternity in fact the mythic form of his neglect and isolation in the pathological world of his delusions? Alone in his “captivity among the Babylonians,”¹⁵ writing letters to his “two wives,” one of whom died even before he entered St. Andrew's, he dwells in the a-temporal world of an eternity in which the past has indeed usurped the present and the dead vampirize the living, most of all himself.

II

The precise nature of Clare's invitation is as subject to debate as his eternity. From a very different perspective than the Tibbles', Harold Bloom has found at the end of this “so hopeless” vision “a tone of something like triumph,” but is less specific in proposing what that triumph might be. Yet his analysis of the conclusion has the virtue of articulating its central interpretive problems: “What meaning can the poem's last line have if eternity is a state merely of non-identity? Why ‘wed’ rather than ‘bound’? … Last, and most crucial, if this is an invitation, where is the voluntary element in the vision? What lies in the will of the maiden?”¹⁶

Perhaps the key to those questions lies in another, namely “Who is the maiden of the invitation?” The biographical answer, identifying her with Mary Joyce, has generally been tacitly assumed,¹⁷ and seems to me both correct and in itself insufficient. For Mary Joyce, the daughter of a Glinton farmer, became many distinct and even contradictory beings, endowed by her absence, like many another beloved, with the protean facility of becoming the embodiment of all the poet had lost and lamented. His deprivation of her became a metonym, in Clare's fantasy, for the various losses of his existence, and even of human existence itself. One critic has suggested that “The phantom of his lost love, Mary Joyce, from being part of the loveliness of Nature became its symbol, till at last in hymning the woman of his dream he is hymning his Nature-love.”¹⁸ Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield concentrate on the archetypal nature of Clare's passion, arguing that after their youthful estrangement Mary remained to Clare “for the rest of his days the symbol of innocence, the Eve of his Eden, the First Love which was to be touchstone for all later experience.”¹⁹ In their early John Clare: A Life the Tibbles proposed that “An invite to Eternity” became an invitation directed “to Love herself perhaps.”²⁰ Mark Storey reflects some of the complexity of the poet's relationship to his lost lady in his evasion of a simple symbolic equation of Mary with a single concept, commenting that “Mary became synonymous with the muse, and with nature” and “is in some sense Clare's prison; he wrote to shackle himself to his ideal, to find a freedom that entails his becoming part of her, his identity lost in hers.”²¹

Interpretations of Mary as Eve, Beatrice/Laura, Mary the sister of Lazarus, Nature, Love, the Muse, or the prison house—all find at least sufficient and often explicit support in Clare's writings. One of the most telling lines Clare ever penned comes in a song from the “Child Harold” cycle: “But Marys abscent every where.”²² To a great extent, Clare's identification with Byron's exile-hero is founded on his sense of irreparable divorce from Mary, who in the course of that cycle, the complement to The Village Minstrel in Clare's own version of the growth of a poet's mind, assumes variously all the symbolic forms explicated by the poet's critics. She as much as Helpstone embodies the exile's lost homeland or harbor and is similarly “abscent” as an image of the idyllism of the poet's childhood.

Beyond this, in her paradoxically omnipresent absence, she symbolizes the insufficiency of reality to human desire and the poet's consequent sense of radical estrangement from his environment. His divorce from reality (here a singularly apt metaphor rather than a clinical cliché) was both the product in part of his separation from Mary and the nurturing soil for his pathological reunion with her in progressively obsessive delusions. If “my dear first love & early wife” helped drive him to the madhouse, it was perhaps only there that he could “wed” himself to her, at least relatively undistracted by the presence of his “real” family. Long since vanished, she becomes almost palpable “every where” by occupying the interstices that exist, for all of us, between the given world and the transcendental thrust of human aspiration. Only a very partial creator of that psychological and spiritual abyss, she becomes its guardian spirit, both a genius loci and a censor of the void.²³

In a sense the blossoming in the 1830s of Clare's delusions concerning his early life with Mary represent the pathology of a convention. Despite his obsession with Mary as the fulfillment of his dreams, we must keep in mind that Clare not only married and raised seven children with his “second wife Patty” (Martha Turner) but addressed many a tender poem to her over the years. Thus a sentimentally indulgent perspective on the earlier relationship merits some of the scorn heaped by D. H. Lawrence on Dante for never mentioning, amid his mystic devotions to Beatrice, the “family of lusty little Dantions”²⁴ back home with Signiora Alighieri. And it must also turn a blind eye to the Patty poems, not to mention those lines addressed to “Sweet Susan,” “Bessey of the glen,” “My sweet Ann Foot, my bonny Ann,” “Sweet Mary Dove,” “Miss B—,” and numerous others.

However intense Clare's first love may have been, it was in fact succeeded if not superseded by others, the absence in some sense filled. Yet the intensity of his feelings of both love and consequent loss grew rather than diminished with time. Clare's statement “Literature has destroyed my head and brought me here” may be of particular relevance to the Mary Joyce question. For even in the poems of the early 1820s in which Mary appears Clare depicts her as an angelic, elfin, witching form. However sincere his feelings for her, that is to say, her poetic incarnation occurs well within the confines of poetic convention. In the conclusion of “A Daydream in Summer” she is the veiled maiden of Alastor and the Cynthia of Keats's Endymion reincarnate in Northamptonshire: “When her small waist he strove to clasp / She shrunk like water from his grasp.”²⁵ In later poems she assumes a fictive aura that owes as much to Jonson and the Cavaliers as to the trecento poets and their descendants.

Mary, as a poetic figure, was from the start conceived as a poetic convention, her absence a prerequisite to her idealization. In her association with the nurturing landscape and imaginative passion of Clare's youth she presents herself as an avatar of the eponymous Rural Muse of Clare's fourth collection. His progressive obsession with her throughout the 1830s was a form of compensation for Clare's painful lack of sympathetic society, the fading of his notoriety, and perhaps his fear of the loss of poetic vision with youthful hopes. Having nowhere to turn for inspiration, and few to turn to for encouragement, he sought both in the resurrection of an adolescent love, the pristine quality of which embodied all the now-shattered hopes delineated in his apologia The Village Minstrel.

As Clare's muse Mary comes to undergo a fearful transformation. Muselike initially in the conventional sense—i. e., as the object of the poet's amorous effusions—she comes to be identified with his imaginative life and poetic capacity itself. Without her, Clare faced an imaginative vacancy inimical to his art. An inspirer of verse and simultaneously a blocking-agent of that vacancy, her image becomes not only the central figure of his imaginative life but its emblem: “Mary the muse of every song I write,” “Mary thou ace of hearts thou muse of song” … In “Child Harold” Clare indulges the curious proclivity to cosmic exaggeration seen in “A Vision,” affirming “I loved her in all climes beneath the sun.”²⁶ Here the lunatic, the lover and the poet are truly of imagination all compact—and both the peculiar appeal and clear limitations of Clare's love poetry are founded on their fusion, the inability of the poet to keep distinct the delusions of his fantasy and the exercise of his imagination.

There may be, then, a symbolic truth in Clare's delusions of having committed bigamy. In the isolation of his rural life in the 1830s, finding his diurnal affairs progressively disjunct from his imaginative life, he became torn between the facticity of his life with Martha and the children and the demands of his creativity. The latter came to focus in an ever more exclusive and escapist manner on Mary, only in part as the earlier object of his affections. This conflict of allegiances, which brought about his breakdown finally, was a “bigamous” tension between domestic life and marriage to the Muse-figure who emblematized his imaginative life. The essence of his delusion about Mary is the confluence of woman and archetype, the subsumption of a human memory by a literary convention become a pathological reality.

Clare's poetry progressed from descriptive apostrophe to literal invocation of Mary, as in the “Child Harold” song “O Mary sing thy songs to me.” Yet his invocation of her went beyond the traditional soliciting of poetic aid. He seems rather to have conjured her habitually as a kind of charm against his desolation. I think we can take Clare quite literally when he describes this almost mantra-like address: “Mary how oft with fondness I repeat / That name alone to give my troubles rest.”²⁷ His imaginative idolatry takes the form of something like a profane rosary.

It is important nonetheless to note that concurrently with his idealizing of woman, Clare indulges in his verse and prose that cynical distrust of her C. S. Lewis has called a twin fruit from the same branch. The conflict of tones is less a matter of complementarity here than simple contradiction, reflecting the extremes of Clare's mental illness, be it cyclothymic or schizophrenic.²⁸ His Don Juan is full of bitterness, emulating Byron's, and there are hints of it as early as the ballad “The spring returns, the pewit screams,” in which he refers to “woman's [and specifically Mary's] cold perverted will / And soon estranged opinion.” In his letters we find him remarking “a man who possesses a woman possesses losses without gain the worst is the road to ruin & the best is nothing like a good cow—man I never did like & woman has long sickened me.”²⁹ In an asylum letter to the long since dead Mary he turns with pathetically rancorous energy on his “vagrant Muse”: “though I have two wives if I got away I should soon have a third & I think I should serve you both right in the bargain by doing so for I dont care a damn about coming home now—so you need not flatter yourself with many expectations of seeing me.”³⁰

The ambivalence of Clare's feelings of obsessive love and betrayal is articulated in “An invite to Eternity” in the sardonic nature of the no-longer conventional invitation. That convention, as remarked, is subverted by the landscape of the work. The terrain of this “eternity” is the demonic obverse of his earlier “The Eternity of Nature”—a deracinated world of shifting dimensions akin to the preternature of various folk-ballads. It has the crepuscular aura of “Thomas Rhymer,” the protean insubstantiality of “The Young Tamlane.” Yet the poem really perhaps recalls most proximately the ballad tradition of the “demon lover,” more comprehensively than Coleridge's crucial but passing allusion to the motif in “Kubla Khan.”

In the ballad known as “The Carpenter's Wife,” for example, a young woman is visited by her seafaring lover who has returned to find her married to another whose child she has borne. After persistent temptation he succeeds in convincing her to run off with him to sea, where at length his diabolic nature (in some versions a “cloven hoof”) is revealed before the ship sinks and the runaway wife is drowned. Invited to green foreign hills (in some versions “the banks o’ Italie”), she is led to a submarine landscape. Clare's persona in “An invite to Eternity” proves similarly diabolical, and in the relationship between the lovers of the ballad he perhaps found an objective correlative for his own sense of past wrong and ultimate revenge.³¹

But if the biographical roots of the conflict are thus apparent, the explication of its symbolism is nonetheless inseparable from Mary's emblematic nature as a Muse-figure. The poem may be on one level a sardonic and vengeful invitation to a faithless and free lover to join the poet in his physical confinement and mental anguish; on another it is a cry to her, in her function as inspirer, for help.

In the 1860 interview with Agnes Strickland, when asked what he meant by charging “they pick my brains out,” Clare replied “Why, they have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet—all the vowels and consonants—and brought them out through my ears; and then they want me to write poetry! I can’t do it.”³² Clare's ability to go on creating through two decades of confinement is a singular triumph of the imagination and will over unpropitious conditions, both physical and psychological. “An invite to Eternity,” I believe, is concerned more than anything else with articulating his difficulties and his doubts about his ability to go on as a poet.

On this level the opening repeated question is by no means rhetorical. Rather Clare is searching his soul, questioning his own imagination: Muse, wilt thou go with me? Even here—to the disoriented world of madness which he proceeds to delineate, and in depicting which he answers the question finally in the affirmative.

This may be the real triumph of the poem. The “eternity” to which the poet looks is neither solely literary, as in the Tibbles' interpretation of his concern with poetic immortality, nor-extra-literary in any theological sense. Clare's eternity is not the infinite extension of time but its absence—first in the disorientation of his mental state, and secondly in its self-transcendence in the dialectical progress of the poem, which circles back upon itself. The concluding affirmation is nothing less than a hierogamy of poet and Muse, complete with a grimly courageous procession to a visionary altar: “Then trace thy footsteps on with me / We’re wed to one eternity.” For analogies to this sacred marriage we need not look so far afield as the “chymical wedding” of alchemy or anthropological royal incest, for High Romanticism is full of such unions, from the demonic couplings of Coleridge's mystery triptych to Keats's Endymion, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Lamia. The better part of D. G. Rossetti's poetic corpus consists of variations on this theme.

Yet once again Clare's delineation of the relationship is as subversive as it is conventional. In the poems named, for example, it is the Muse-figure, as the symbol of the creative unconscious, that is at home in the preternature into which she draws the poet or his surrogate. The wailing woman summons the poet of “Kubla Khan” from the fashionable Oriental idyll of the first stanza into a magical realm that was thereafter to become his visionary home, and prison. Cynthia leads Endymion from a native land to which, like the Ancient Mariner after his confrontation with Life-in-Death, he never fully returns. Clare inverts the traditional relationship between Muse and poet, guide and guided. In his madness he is already initiated into a realm to which the Muse is a stranger. She is invited to a landscape that is without substance or stability, which the poet succeeds in traversing and infusing with form by forcing his Muse, the emblem of the transformative imagination, to accompany him. The coerced tracing of rhythmic or metrical footsteps is a Los-like assertion of the imagination's supremacy over chaos in a region as amorphous as the phantasmal forest of Entuthon Benython that surrounds Blake's Golgonooza.

It would be comforting to leave Clare in his moment of complex triumph. But the comfort would be specious since, as I suggested earlier, the figure of the poet confined in “the English Bastile a government Prison where harmless people are trapped and tortured till they die”³³ is greater than the sum of his creations there. Having now spent some time with what is possibly the finest of those works, I will close with a non-poetic utterance, his last letter, in which the aged poet comes to share the mythic aura in which Wordsworth perceived that blind London beggar with the facts of his life pinned to his chest. This letter, written in response to an unknown inquirer Mr. James Hipkin, seems not only a testament to the provisional nature of the redemptive power of poetic form and the ultimate triumph of the ineffable, but almost, like the beggar's label, a symbol “of the utmost we can know, / Both of ourselves and of the universe.”

March 8 1860

Dear Sir,

I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I dont know I have nothing to say so I conclude

Yours respectfully John Clare.³⁴

Notes

1. See, for example, John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972); Janet M. Todd, In Adam's Garden: A Study of John Clare's Pre-Asylum Poetry (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1973); and Timothy Brownlow, “A Molehill for Parnassus: John Clare and Prospect Poetry,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, 48 (1978), 23-40. Mark Storey, The Poetry of John Clare (New York: St. Martin's, 1974) finds The Shepherd's Calendar the focal point of Clare's poetic development but is less concerned with the tradition per se.

2. The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 121. “Journal” entry of “Wed. 10 Nov. 1824.”

3. J. W. and Anne Tibble, John Clare: His Life and Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1956), p. 199.

4. Letters of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p. 299.

5. See Clare's own comments on Keats in Prose, p. 223: “ … his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies & not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he describes—.”

6. See Clare: Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 18ff.

7. I follow the text of Poems of John Clare's Madness, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949). See too a different poem with the same title in The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1964), p. 168.

8. Text of “An invite to Eternity” from Clare: Selected Poems and Prose, pp. 223-24.

9. John Clare: His Life and Poetry, p. 10. See too his accounts of George Cousins and a youthful apparition in the “Autobiography” (Prose, pp. 29, 40-41).

10. See Letters, p. 199, and further Margaret Grainger, John Clare: Collector of Ballads, Peterborough Museum Society, Occasional Papers, No. 3 (1964).

11. “A Molehill for Parnassus,” pp. 38, 25.

12. See Later Poems, p. 104.

13. Oxford English Dictionary, “trace v¹” II.5.

14. John Clare: His Life and Poetry, p. 192.

15. Letters, p. 300.

16. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), p. 452.

17. Or not so tacitly, as in Grigson, p. 31: “ … he asks Mary—it is certainly Mary—to merge with him into the eternal.” John and Anne Tibble suggest, however, that “it no longer matters whom” Clare is addressing in the poem (John Clare: His Life and Poetry, p. 192).

18. Unsigned review in TLS, 21 February 1935, pp. 97-98, quoted in Clare: the Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 383.

19. Clare: Selected Poems and Prose, p. 21.

20. John Clare: A Life (London: Cobdon-Sanderson, 1932), p. 427.

21. The Poetry of John Clare, pp. 145, 170.

22. Text of “Child Harold” from Later Poems, pp. 35-80. Quotation from p. 56.

23. Of particular relevance to this point is his poem “The Lost One,” The Poems of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Dent, 1935), II, 503.

24. A Selection from Phoenix, ed. A. A. Inglis (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 168.

25. Poems, I, 429.

26. Later Poems, p. 45.

27. Later Poems, p. 43.

28. Eleanor L. Nicholes, “The Shadowed Mind” (Ph.D. dissertation, NYU, 1950) argues that Clare was schizophrenic. See too Grigson, p. 23ff. Clare was analyzed as “cyclothymic” (“manic-depressive” in today's terminology) by Thomas Tennant in “Reflections of Genius,” Journal of Medical Science, vol. 99, no. 414.

29. Letters, p. 295. He continues, however: “—but even there I should wish for one whom I am always thinking of & almost every song I write has some sighs or wishes in Ink about Mary.”

30. Letters, p. 290.

31. Peterborough Museum MS. 42 contains Clare's ballad “Whos that knocking on my window,” which is in the tradition of “The Daemon Lover,” “James Herries,” “The Carpenter's Wife,” “Sweet William's Ghost” etc., detailing the betrayed and supernatural lover's return to haunt his beloved.

32. John Clare: His Life and Poetry, p. 199.

33. Ibid., p. 177 (quoting MS. 110, pp. 125-27).

34. Letters, p. 309.