JOHN CLARE,
POET OF
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
The poet, John Clare
was born in the thatched cottage in the village of Helpston near Peterborough,
on 13th July 1793, (he was baptised in Helpston at four weeks old on
11th August 1793), the son of Parker Clare, born 1763 and Ann
Stimson, born 1757, who were married on 29th October 1792 in
Marholm, Northamptonshire. John’s twin sister unfortunately died at just a few
weeks old.
The cottage was
originally five dwelling places which were later joined together. John was schooled
in the nearby village
of Glinton where he met
and fell in love with a local beauty named Mary Joyce, the love and the sorrow
of his life. John began writing verse as a young boy, stuffing the sheets of
paper into a chink in the cottage wall which his mother would use for
fire-lighting; he seems not to have minded their being consumed by flames as
they were early attempts at poetry. After school, John worked as an
agricultural labourer and continued writing his verse which would, in 1820, be
published as ‘Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenes’. The same year, he
married Martha (‘Patty’) Turner at Great
Casterton Church,
on 16th March
1820 and they had several children: Anna Maria (June 1820), Eliza
Louisa (June 1822), Frederick
(January 1824), John (June 1826), William Parker (May 1828), Sophia (September
1830) and Charles in 1833.
His first volume of
poems proved successful and he was lionised and celebrated in literary society.
Further volumes of poetry were published: ‘The Village Minstrel’ (1821), ‘The
Shepherd’s Calendar’ (1827) and ‘The Rural Muse’ (1835). In 1832 he left his
native cottage in Helpston for a cottage in Northborough, a village three miles
away, a move which disturbed him greatly. Several years later, on 8th
July 1837, he was certified insane and two days after his 44th
birthday, he was admitted to High Beach asylum, Epping, on 15th July
‘by authority of his wife’; after several unsuccessful escape attempts in early
1841, he managed to escape in July of that year and walked the long distance
back to Northamptonshire, compelled to eat grass along the way and under the
delusion that he was married to Mary Joyce and that he would find her on his
return. Sadly, Mary Joyce had died unmarried on 14th July 1838, the day after John
Clare’s 45th birthday, while he had been one year at High Beach.
Following five months at his Northborough cottage, he was again certified as
insane and admitted to Northampton General Asylum on 29th December 1841 where
he was given much freedom. He continued to write verse which have been
classified as his ‘asylum poems’ and he liked nothing better than to while away
the hours under the portico of All Saint’s Church in Northampton. John’s
mother, Ann Clare, died on 18th
December 1835 aged 78 and she was buried at Helpston on 21st
December; John’s father, Parker Clare, died in Northborough on 5th March 1846
aged 82 and he was buried the following day and laid to rest next to his wife,
Anne, at St. Botolph’s Church, Helpston.
John Clare died on the
afternoon of Friday 20th
May 1864 at Northampton Asylum and his body was brought back by
train to Helpston. On Tuesday 24th May the poet’s remains were laid
overnight at the Exeter Arms public house opposite the church of St. Botolphs.
The following day, Wednesday 25th May, at 3 p.m., the funeral took
place; there was a short procession from the Manor of Mr. and Mrs. Bellairs
next to the Exeter Arms which included the poet’s widowed wife, Patty, and
their children, William and Eliza; also among them were the Reverend Charles
Mossop and his sister Jane. Because the vicar of Helpston was away in Scotland, the
funeral was performed by the vicar of nearby Glinton, Reverend Edward
Pengelley. Clare’s oak coffin bearing the brass breastplate with his name and
dates of birth and death was laid next to his parents in the churchyard, ‘under
the shade of a sycamore tree’. *
Three years later, a
memorial stone designed by Michael Drury of Lincoln, made of Ketton stone, was
paid for by public subscription and placed over the grave which bore the famous
inscription – ‘A POET IS BORN NOT MADE’.
John’s wife, Patty
Clare, died in Spalding on 5th
February 1871, aged 70 and she was buried in Northborough on 8th
February.
[Celebrating John
Clare by Greg Crossan, the John Clare Society Journal, number 12, July 1993,
(Bicentenary Number), edited by John Goodrich (and Kelsey Thornton), pp. 18-25.
*: Life and Remains of John Clare. J. L. Cherry. London, Frederick Warne &
Co. 1873. p. 128]
A HELPSTON PILGRIMAGE
TO
RONALD BLYTHE (1922-2023)
‘WHO
BORE THE SAME UNREST’
BY BARRY
VAN-ASTEN
To call you a ‘peasant
poet’ seems an insult –
The epithet has held
you back, kept you from
Rising; being praised
like Keats and Wordsworth;
But for circumstances
of your birth… instead,
Rooted firm by place
and the identifiable,
Parochial minor
versifier, simply ignored
Because your class and
stature didn’t fit!
‘Pasture poet’,
‘rustic bard’, ‘balladeer’…
These words evoke
songs of the landscape,
Of labour fortified by
ale; of working the soil,
A physical contact
that draws poetry from earth;
Of sweat and toil and
thoughts of carnal joy,
Not some romantic
vision, or brown-limbed
Herdboy sat
picturesquely in some leafy idyll.
I crossed the
threshold of your home and looked
Through all the
windows at the street outside;
I touched all the
beams, the hearth was aglow
As I summoned you to
me and there you sat
With the ache of
tomorrow, by window-nook;
I watched you
scribbling to scent of lavender,
Your secret poems that
you stuffed into a chink
In the wall which were
found by your mother
And used for
fire-lighting.
Time lost by stream
and tree hollow, dreaming
Of Mary Joyce beneath
green boughs that sway
Till the soft brush of
moth wing upon your cheek
Breaks you free from
pale heaving bosom…
Draws an incantation
to those lips most sweet –
‘By field mouse and
fledgling, by feather and fate:
I bind thee to me,
always, Mary Joyce!’
Like you, dear soul, I
mutter and fumble
In my solitude as I
ramble, frenetic at lip,
Like stream, we
meander as Nene will do,
Through our imagination
and our sorcery;
To whisper confessions
to wind and oblivion:
In fields fascinated
by tooth, claw and beak –
We listen to the
language of the corn, for O,
‘Tis nature educates
the soul… we believe.
I watched a
yellowhammer on the hawthorn
That had enclosed the
meadow, and in the field
I stuffed an ear of
wheat into my pocket.
Passing a hollow in a
tree I thought of your poem
And those daisies, old
as Adam, swaying…
In the cool wood, a
pathway curved and butterflies
Circled every step
haunted by the hum of bees
To the chiffchaff’s
delightful company in the glade!
There, wrapt in song
of the rural muse, you sit
In your loved corner
seat as mother spun yarn;
Tender of sheep,
nature boy, through field and
Through spinney,
returning home with dirty knees
And a world of dreams…
and a bunch of flowers:
Lady’s Smock,
Speedwell and Lesser Celandine,
Picked from field
edges and placed in a water jug.
Fashion me sonnets
from the sedge, I implored;
Warble me sweet songs
of the wilderness…
The cuckoo chant of
ecstasy rings through copse
And with pockets
stuffed with seeds, snail shells,
Feathers, a bright
polished pebble, down lane and
Over furrow – I too
knew that wonder as a boy,
Immersed in the sacred
and the divine of nature;
To draw the ghost and
the spirit from sun on water,
Of millpond and rank
weed beds… to read the stones
And listen, in those
secret places, not seen by many
For there is a strange
eroticism in the landscape!
Obsessing over nesting
birds or found hedgerow beast:
Fox, badger and hedgehog…
a broken jaw bone… before
The ‘blue devils’
beset you with delusions of being:
Byron and Burns and a
bigamist… but always there
Was the shadow of the
asylum door… still, you dream
Of eyes and thighs of
Mary Joyce chained by runic charm;
Sweet Glinton girl
wrapt as brier around your heart…
A virile lunacy of
fancies and forebodings…
A beautiful madness,
perhaps the brain’s indifference
To the wearisome world
of men and women around you:
Let the heart dwell on
the serenity that you had found;
The scenes of pastoral
ecstasy that you conjured here
Like magic from a
world, unseen by many!
And alas! Those
mutterings were muted, but posterity
Still sings your songs
of wilderness and desire – a light,
Inextinguishable as we
connect with surrounding… for
Here be paradise, your
‘nest’ where bramble and teazle,
By willow are home to
the hare and the lark.
I found a penny in the
village at the Butter Cross and
Stuffed it like a
secret poem between the stones of
Your grave… returning
home: a dozen sombre crows
All in a row, with
their heads down as at a funeral,
They seemed to repeat
– ‘a poet is born not made’.
[Helpston. Saturday 5th July 2025]
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