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Wednesday 2 July 2008

‘Alone and in a stranger scene’: Alienation and John Clare

 

The phrase used on the title of this paper[1] comes from The Flitting, a poem Clare wrote in the 1840s when he had already been confined to an asylum in Northamptonshire for nearly ten years. The focus of this poem was his sense of loss and is reiterated throughout his writings:

“Strange scenes mere shadows are to me”[2]

“Life is to me a dream that never wakes.”[3]

“The past it is a magic word

Too beautiful to last…”[4]

Alienation or detachment from the world as it is is a recurring theme in Clare’s poetry certainly from the early 1820s.

‘Nature’s Threads’

The pastoral poets of the eighteenth century, particularly Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe wrote of the lost peace and virtues of country life. Yet the poems of the happy tenant as the idealised and independent self of the reflective pastoral tradition are succeeded by poems of loss, change and regret, poems that express the sense of appalled withdrawal. The identification of a Golden Age of rural life with humble and worthy characters in a rural setting contrasted with the wealth and ambition of the city and the court was the creation of the mid-eighteenth century. It can be seen in Gray’s Elergy

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strike

Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;

Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.”

And in Goldsmith’s most famous and yet baffling poem The Deserted Village (1769)

“A time there was, ere England’s griefs began

When every road of ground maintained its man.”

The old village was both happy and productive, while the new conditions of change were both unhappy and unproductive.

“No more thy glassy brook reflects the day

But choked with sedges, works its weedy way;

Along they glades, a solitary quest

The hollow sounding bittern guards its nest

Amidst they desert walk, the lapwing flies

And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.”

The result is a shift in focus away from the landscape to seeing people in their environments and how change affected them. There was a gradual rejection of the ‘pastoral’ and the emergence of a powerful social and psychological sense of alienation. George Crabbe wrote in 1811,

“No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain

But own the Village Life a life of pain.”

The imperative shifts from one of beauty to one of morality and the degeneration of moral values and moral support within society as a consequence of economic change. Oppression becomes the key concept as the humanitarian values of paternalism with its passionate insistence on care and sympathy and an implied standard of plain and virtuous living was deliberately and progressively dismantled. This was Thomas Carlyle’s “abdication on the part of the governors” and George Crabbe’s “where Plenty smiles – alas she smiles for few”.

A sense of change

The notion of a ‘Golden Age’ is, and has always been a rhetorical device, a means of giving nostalgia respectability. It is used, frequently by those who do not wish to change or who see change as a threat to their own vested interests. It is a concept of extreme selfishness. Yet change in rural England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did bring substantial ‘loss’.

First, there was a decline in the living standards of agricultural labourers as they were denied access to commons and wastes as grazing for their few animals and as sources of fuel. Thomas Bewick wrote in his autobiography of the division of waste lands in 1812: “the poor man was rooted out and the various mechanics of the village derived of the benefit of it”. Secondly, there was a growing sense of resentment against farmers and landowners felt across the political spectrum from the Tory Robert Southey to the radical Shelley. The focus for this resentment was largely, though not exclusively the enclosure of land. “All I know is, I had a cow and Parliament took it from me”, Arthur Young imagined a poor man saying and Thomas Bewick described Anthony Liddell in the following terms: “He maintained that the fowls of the air and the fishes in the sea were free to all men; consequently, game-laws or laws to protect the fisheries had no weight with him…”

The notion of a ‘Golden Age’ constructs a mythical sense of community where all, despite social and economic inequality were happy and contented. Enclosure destroyed this sense of ‘oneness’, Yet it is a community always in retrospect, a community in which mutuality of interest had begun to break down, if it had ever existed before John Clare began to write and arguably even before he was born in 1793. In this period of change, it mattered greatly where you were looking from. Points of view, interpretations, selections from reality revolved around a complex of different ways of seeing even the same rural life.

A green language

William Wordsworth moved view of rural life away from the essentially descriptive perspectives of pastoralists like Goldsmith and Crabbe. While the latter provided evidence of lack of community, of the village as a life of pain Wordsworth saw communities as separated from life in any direct way. It is the essential isolation and silence and loneliness that became the only carriers of nature and community against the rigorous and selfish ease of ordinary society. The labourer now merges with his landscape, is seen at a distance as a part of the much larger romantic conception of Nature. It is no longer the will that will transform nature, it is the lonely creative imagination alone through which it is possible to recreate the pastoral idyll, if not the reality. This is the ‘green language’ of poetry, a phrase first used by Clare in his Pastoral Poesy:

“A language that is ever green

That feelings unto all impart

As hawthorn blossoms soon as seen

Give May to every heart.”

Closer descriptions of nature – of birds, trees, the effects of weather and of light – are a marked element in Clare’s writings and clearly related to lived experience and intense observation.

The rural bard

Clare thought that his Richard and Kate made him “first of the Rural Bards in the country”. In his early poem Helpstone, he contrasted the ‘industry’ of the old world with the ‘wealth’ of the new:

“Accursed Wealth! O’er bounding human laws,

Of every evil though remains’t 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.”

This was written in 1809 when Clare was sixteen and connects a lost phase of living, lost identity, lost relations and lost certainties. It is reinforced in Joys of Childhood,

“Dull is that memory, vacant in that mind

Where no sweet vsion of the past appears.”

Nature, the past and childhood are powerfully fused. This is an experience of pain, of withdrawal into ‘nature’, into the Eden of the heart and the past. Eventually, it was to lead to the speaking silence of a neglected past, a man alone with nature, with poverty, with ‘madness’ recreating a world in his green language:

“I am, but what I am

None cares or know?

My friends forsake me

As a memory lost

I am the self-consumer of my woes

They rise and vanish in oblivious hope

Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost

And yet I am….”

Clare was born in Helpstone near Peterborough in 1793. His parents were barely literate and, according to the law of averages he should have become an agricultural labourer earning a basic subsistence wage. When he learned to read and write, he became an exception; when he committed to writing poetry, he became an anomaly. His first book Poems Descriptive of Rural Life Scenery was published in 1820 and quickly went into four editions. Clare became a nine-day wonder. He married Patty Turner though he was haunted by memories of Mary Joyce, a local farmer’s daughter until he died. A second volume The Village Minstrel appeared in 1821 and two years later he began work on a long, ambitious poem The Shepherd’s Calendar that appeared in 1825.

He visited London in 1820, 182 and 1824 and was lionised by the literati as the ‘green man’. However, health problems began to have a serious effect on him. From 1823, he suffered bouts of severe melancholia, doubt and hopelessness that were diagnosed as manic depression. In 1828, he made his last visit to London. In 1830-31, he suffered severe and prolonged illness and moved to a larger cottage at Northborough, a few miles from Helpstone with the support of his friends. Though intended to ameliorate his plight, this proved the last straw completing his sense of alienation. He was taken to an asylum in Epping in 1837 but escaped four year later returning home in search of his first ‘wife’ Mary Joyce. He stayed at home from June to December 1841 but was then confined to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he died on 20th May 1864.

Until 1825, his work was a prolific celebration of delight in perceiving and re-presenting natural life and an exploration of the relationships of a hardworking, lowly human society to a rural environment and the cycle of the year with its swings from summer to bleak winter. The relationship between word and world was harmonious and unstrained. By the early 1830s, however, difficult truths had shaken his delicate and vulnerable sensibility. The shift from a primarily oral to a literate and literary culture, though necessary to reach a wider audience increasingly cut Clare off from the people he lived among for whom poetry was a closed book. His own wife could not share his life as a poet and Mary Joyce became and remained the emblem of what might have been.

Clare discovered himself adrift and in limbo. Even his sacral landscapes had proved impermanent, despoiled beyond recognition by the ‘improvements’ of enclosure. This led to a deepening sense of disenchantment and alienation. This threatened to overwhelm the impulse to affirm the joys and delights of Nature. It proved an irreconcilable dilemma as Clare swung between bouts of mental instability and relative sanity. His own inner dialectic was played out in his later works where the positive and negative features of his psyche battle for supremacy within the same works. The dialectic between past and present, childhood and age, nature and wealth were only resolved for Clare in death. As he wrote in I Am in 1848

“I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where women never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator God

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.”


[1] This paper was initially written in 1997 and was revised in 2008.

[2] From The Flitting

[3] This extract comes from Written in a thunderstorm July 15th 1841

[4] From Childhood

Tuesday 1 July 2008

Breaking the chains or recreating the prison? 2

Before the Romantics

Some of the characteristics of this period can be illustrated from the writings of George Crabbe, who, in 1783, a year after he was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Rutland published his poem ‘The Village’. Crabbe’s sombre view of society was part of that great wave of seriousness and social conscience seen most clearly in the life and works of William Wilberforce and the Evangelicals. In other respects, Crabbe was fully in the eighteenth century tradition. His interest in the life of the lower classes was reminiscent of Defoe and his real compassion for poverty came nearest to that of Johnson. He had a strict religious and moral code, though he disliked religious enthusiasm. He was no social reformer and had no political axe to grind. He did not rail against enclosure or blame the landowners and seemed scarcely aware of the existence of an Industrial Revolution. Want and hardship were facts of nature and must be borne; life did have occasional pleasures, but they were only temporary relief from pain:

“For what is Pleasure, that we toil to gain

Tis but a slow or rapid flight from Pain.”

He did not share the Romantic attitude to nature; to him it was not a subject of mysticism but merely a relentless repetition against which people played out their lives. His writings did, however, have a strong sense of realism. Not for him the idyllic themes of shepherd and shepherdesses in rustic harmony. He knew better and had seen too much poverty to idealise it. Poetry was poor compensation for cold and hunger when poets failed to recognise that distress was the normal experience. Rural life was not a story of rustic contentment but an endless routine of labour from dawn to dusk, in heat and cold, until age and sickness reduced men and women to penury, the workhouse and the grave:

“No longer truth, though shown in verse, disdain

But own the Village Life a life of pain.”

Crabbe made a deep impression on contemporaries. The Edinburgh Review in 1807 declared: “There is a truth and a force in these descriptions of rural life, that is calculated to sink deep into the memory; and, being confirmed by daily observation, they are recalled upon innumerable occasions when the ideal pictures of more fanciful authors have lost all their interest.”  His was a grim picture but one that touched the conscience of the age. It was echoed in a long succession of writers from Coleridge and Cobbett to Carlyle and the Chartists; but unlike them, Crabbe called for no specific social remedies. William Hazlitt did not enjoy Crabbe’s poetry. He wrote in The Spirit of the Age that, “His song is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe...” He dated a change of taste from about the date of Crabbe’s poem: “We cannot help thinking that a taste for the sort of poetry which leans for support on the truth and fidelity of its imitation of nature, began to display itself much about that time…in consequence of the direction of the public taste to the subject of painting.”

Like Crabbe, the young Wordsworth and Coleridge were acutely aware of the hardships suffered by the poor. Wordsworth, who had fought a difficult case to gain possession of his small patrimony from the hands of the Earl of Lonsdale, was very much aware of the oppressive weight of the aristocracy on the countryside and of the sufferings of the poor in periods of unemployment and distress. But ultimately theirs was a different vision.

The meaning of romanticism

The word ‘romantic’ seems to have first come into use in England in the mid-seventeenth century when it meant ‘having the wild or exciting qualities of medieval romances’. In the eighteenth century it was often used as a term of abuse implying what was irrational. Doctor Johnson, for example, wrote of “romantic absurdities” but it was also occasionally used to describe a scene such as a moonlit landscape that aroused pleasurable sensations of mystery and loneliness.

It was German philosophers who first used ‘romantic’ as the antithesis of ‘classical’. They rejected the philosophy of the Enlightenment with its assumption that people lived in a rational universe in which all problems had a rational answer. They sought to explore the irrational, to discover meaning on a deeper level than was explored by science and reason. In England, the conflict between the romantic and the classical was less marked than on the continent because the fundamentals of classical thought had already been eroded by the empirical philosophy of the eighteenth century. Yet in England too, Wordsworth accompanied his poetical experiments with an attack on Alexander Pope and Edmund Burke jeered at the philosophy of Bolingbroke.

The Romantic poets sought to give new dimensions both to nature and the human mind. Coleridge suggested that there was a two-fold approach to the problem while commenting on the composition of the Lyrical Ballads. “It was agreed that my efforts should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of every day and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us....”

There were not, however, two separate operations but different aspects of the same exploration of the ‘inward nature’ of which Coleridge wrote. In a sense, however, Coleridge’s attitude was the more ‘romantic’ because he was dealing more directly with the faculty of the imagination. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was more conscious of the existence of a spirit in wild nature that existed independent of men's minds but that reflected the same stirrings as moved humanity: it was the idea of the mind being in accord with the spirit of nature that so inspired him. This was why William Blake so distrusted Wordsworth for the idea to him smacked too much of naturalism. For to Blake it was not Nature but the spirit of man that was important.

The attitudes of the Romantics to nature might be esoteric, sublime and difficult to understand, but it their simple appreciation of wild scenery they were reflecting a general opinion. The Edinburgh Review, hardly a poetic journal, commented in May 1811 that, “There is the sublime impression of the Mighty Power which piled the massive cliffs upon each other and rent the mountains asunder and scattered their giant fragments at their base....Add to all this the traces of vast and obscure antiquity that are impressed on the language and habits of the people; and on the cliffs and caves and gulfy torrents of the land; and the solemn and touching reflection perpetually recurring, of the weakness and insignificance of perishable man...”

This does not specially express romanticism, but rather the generally accepted view in 1811. But it does underline some of its important constituents: a new sense of history, of people retaining their ancient traditions through long periods of time and all of this taking place against the backdrop of nature. This is not a ‘breaking free’ from the constraints of the past but rather a conservative reflection of the importance of traditions. The Romantic poet and philosopher started from the assumption that empirical science and philosophy were inadequate as a means of answering all the most important questions of human life. The argument is clearly put in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and can be summarised as follows.

  1. Locke and his followers operated upon a certain level of thought that was limited by the confines of empiricism. Their thought led directly to utilitarianism.
  2. The Utilitarians regarded the selfish and transitory interests of man as alone of significance: the object was to achieve ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Shelley argued that this led to the politics and philosophy of selfishness.
  3. What was needed was to transfer the argument to a higher place of reality, that of the permanent and universal. This was why Shelley placed poets above what he called “reasoners and mechanists” and imagination above reason. He therefore called upon the arts of music, poetry, architecture and painting to restore imagination to its rightful place in human affairs. The idea is essentially Platonic; the poet apprehends a harmony that exists in the universe beneath the conflicting fragments and transitory details of daily life.

To the Augustans the mind was a kind of mirror reflecting and recording the external world, and since that world was a rational world governed by ascertainable laws, all that was needed for its comprehension was knowledge and the power of judgement. To the Romantics it was different. There was a material world but it was transcended by an ideal world of the mind, a world that created harmony.

In emphasising the importance of the power of imagination the poet laid himself open to the accusation that he was merely creating a world of his own, which had no necessary connection to anyone else's world. The danger was that Romantics might come to think of themselves as Gods creating their own moral standards. Byron was certainly not free from this. Wordsworth was more humble and sought patiently for the spirit of the universe as expressed by Nature. Shelley thought he had found it in the spirit of love and Blake saw the imagination as the “Divine Vision”. Despite the lofty intellectualism of their principles, the Romantic poets did not consider themselves as living in ivory towers remote from reality. They saw themselves as men of action. Wordsworth wished to be seen above all as a teacher. Shelley declared that all the great authors of revolution in the world’s history were poets[1]; “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. In this we have the fundamental difference between the Romantics and the Augustans. To the latter poets and artists were interpreters of the world. To the Romantics they were creators.

The Romantic dilemma

In general, the Romantic poet was aware of an ideal world, often more real than the material world; but it was also a world of imponderable force that he could never fully understand. The imagination could create it in part, but there was always something that eluded his grasp; he was always aware of the gulf between the ideal and its attainment. This gulf became a mystery to be described and, if possible, explained. The quest for a bridge between reality and the imagination was created in a variety of ways:

  1. Some poets like Coleridge sought, through mind-expanding drugs like opium, to expand their consciousness of the supernatural. This can be seen particularly in Kublai Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
  2. Interest in the supernatural was often accompanied by a revival of interest in medieval history and romance. Horace Walpole pointed the way towards the Gothic novel in his The Castle of Otranto. His interest in Gothic architecture, with its darkness, its clanging halls, winding passages and hanging tapestries, led him to reconstruct a fantastic story of the supernatural that contained most of the elements of Romantic medievalism. This was taken further in the work of Anne Radcliffe in her novels A Sicilian Romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian and by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein.

In making the gulf between reality and imagination, as Keats called it “the burden of a mystery” the Romantics in their quest for truth created a prison for themselves. It has been suggested that they were social misfits, weak and vapid in their idealism and superficially there may appear to be some truth in this assertion. Keats, Shelley and Byron all died young, their idealism intact. Shelley was a rebel; Byron a social outcast; William Blake a mystic; John Clare went mad; Coleridge was a drug addict and only he and Wordsworth lived on with changed increasingly Tory views to enjoy a respectable if drab old age. Yet their romanticism was, for all its vapidity, deeply concerned with the philosophical significance of life. They all agreed in making the highest possible claims for the importance of poetry, resting their claims upon the importance of the human heart and the faculty of imagination in the pursuit of truth. All were deeply interested in the political problems of their day and Shelley and Coleridge at least made important contributions to the political thought of their time.

Romanticism sought to break the chains that bound people to the rationalist Enlightenment agenda and in this they were, within limits, successful. In doing so, however, they recreated the rationalist prison. In their search to understand the ‘mystery’ of the rift between reality and imagination they used the past with all its traditional conservatism to bolster their case. In raising radical questions about the nature of the individual, of society and of the relationship between the individual and the state they posed fundamental questions but they found no solutions. Solutions are ultimately about responding to real rather than imagined scenarios. The Romantics lost in their world of the idealised intellect had difficulty in expounding their philosophies to an audience set in the real world. This was their dilemma and ultimately their failure.


[1] This may well be why Plato in The Republic sought to ban poets from his polity.