1. Out of place and out of mind
What was the catalyst during the autumn and early winter of 1841 that made Patty Clare realise that she could not cope with her returned husband living, as they were, in Northborough?
These thoughts were penned whilst preparing the ‘script’ for the John Clare Society’s visit to Glinton Church visit in July 2009, whilst reading Tim Chilcott’s John Clare - The Living Year 1841 and re-reading storyteller Hugh Lupton’s perceptive words from the June 2009 Society Newsletter:
Hugh Lupton also locates John Clare’s plight within more universal themes of exile and exclusion as he recalls a conversation with a Native-American storyteller. He was told that when his people were put into reservations it was as though they had been ‘taken out of their minds’; that their landscape and consciousness were so embedded that to be taken out of place was to be taken out of mind. This led Lupton to think about Enclosure and about how John Clare’s own life and narrative were also about losing place.
Here is Clare writing in The Flitting (49-56) which speaks, as does the whole poem, of being physically separated from the scenes of his youth:
Alone and in a stranger scene,
Far, far from spots my heart esteems,
The closen with their ancient green,
Heaths, woods, and pastures, sunny streams.
The hawthorns here were hung with may,
But still they seem in deader green,
The sun e’en seems to lose its way
Nor knows the quarter it is in.
But there is another thread to his final breakdown. That of his illusory relationship with his boyhood love, Mary Joyce. Having finished the Journal of his escape from High Beech Asylum, written the day after he returned to Northborough in July 1841, he addressed it with a letter to Mary Clare, Glinton:
I am not so lonely as I was in Essex, for here I can see Glinton Church
So for the next few months he searches for her in and around their childhood haunts. By September 1841 we find him recording in his massive collection of linked poems known as Child Harold, largely written during 1841, these words:
If Mary would meet me
I'd kiss her sweet beauty & love them away
Seek Mary agen
But silence is teasing
Wherever I stray
There's nothing seems pleasing
Or aching thoughts easing
Though Mary lives near me—she seems far away
Gradually, over the 3 month period, he seems to be coming to the final terrible realisation that Mary Joyce was not just ‘far away’, but was in reality, dead. The straws are accumulating.
In poem after poem over virtually his whole output, we find Clare speaking of Mary in the most intimate of language - and of his love and loss. But we do not see Clare admitting, even to himself, that Mary was no more. Or do we?
In Child Harold, we find these intriguing lines, written in September or October of that fateful year:
O Mary dear, three Springs have been
Three Summers too have blossomed here
Three blasting Winters crept between
Though absence is the most severe
Another Summer blooms in green
But Mary never once was seen
I've sought her in the fields & flowers
I've sought her in the forest groves
In avenues & shaded bowers
& every scene that Mary loves
E'en round her home I seek her here
But Mary’s absent every-where
‘Tis autumn & the rustling corn
Goes loaded on the creaking wain
I seek her in the early morn
But cannot meet her face again
Sweet Mary she is absent still
& much I fear she ever will
Here is Tim Chilcott on this period:
… after the escape from High Beech in July, and the slow, wrenching realisation (my emphasis) that Mary will never be found again, a more reflective, ruminative voice is heard... The act of remembering takes on an increasingly ambiguous role, on the one hand affirming the value of the past, on the other serving only to accentuate the separation between what has gone and what remains.
Mary died in a house fire in her home in Glinton on the 14th of July 1838, three Winters, Springs and Summers later Clare arrives back in Northborough (via Glinton) from four years exile in High Beech. Then after seeking her in the three months from July to September we find Clare admitting to himself in the words of the “Three Springs” poem that all was lost.
Was it the sight of the flame-blackened lintel at Mary’s home during his searches for her (as visitors to Glinton Church and Green can still observe by strolling along the road toward the Joyce Farmhouse) finally make him realise she was dead?
Out of place in Northborough he was now, with Mary gone, finally taken out of mind. By Christmas his position in Northborough was impossible to maintain, “a stranger to his own family”, and he was removed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum on 29th December 1841.
2. The Desolation Within
In my earlier chapter – “Out of place, out of mind” -- I sought to explore Clare’s state of mind after returning from High Beech to Northborough in 1841, and in particular whether the realisation that Mary Joyce was dead finally drove him to be “a stranger to his own family”?
My contention being that in the poem “Three Springs…” written in September/October of 1841, we find Clare admitting to himself what was common knowledge in the Glinton and Northborough villages. Mary Joyce was dead. She had died in a house fire three years earlier, and her grave was visible to all in the graveyard of St. Benedict’s Church, Glinton.
I am now seeking, with the aid of Clare’s song from Child Harold — “I think of thee at early dawn” likely composed in mid November of the same year — to further explore the anguish and despair that rose starkly in his mind following this earlier realisation.
What is entirely without dispute is that Clare was becoming extremely unstable. Clare is driven, in these final months of 1841, by the strength of the screaming desolation within him; and by his erratic behaviour passing that misery and despair along to Patty and the family in Northborough.
The ambiguity of what his mind and memory, almost unbidden dwelt upon, finally caused him to become so unbalanced, that Patty sought help. The utter misery of this man who was her husband within her home was maddening, but there was nothing she could do without recourse to Parson Glossop and through him to the authorities in Northampton Asylum. Living with such a mentally unbalanced man drove her to a despondency that could only be solved by his removal.
So to the poem from Child Harold. Here we will find Clare’s disintegrating state-of-mind, still totally preoccupied with Mary, graphically illustrated:
Song
I think of thee at early day
& wonder where my love can be
& when the evening shadows grey
O how I think of thee
Along the meadow banks I rove
& down the flaggy fen
& hope my first & early love
To meet thee once agen
I think of thee at dewy morn
& at the sunny noon
& walks with thee—now left forlorn
Beneath the silent moon
I think of thee I think of all
How blest we both have been—
The sun looks pale upon the wall
& autumn shuts the scene
I can't expect to meet thee now
The winter floods begin
The wind sighs through the naked bough
Sad as my heart within
I think of thee the seasons through
In spring when flowers I see
In winters lorn & naked view
I think of only thee
While life breaths on this earthly ball
What e'er my lot may be
Wether in freedom or in thrall
Mary I think of thee
(Child Harold : lines 873-900)
How many times had he walked the paths and tracks between the cottage and Glinton, no doubt visiting again and again the places they had both loved. All he hoped and desired was a glimpse, a sight of his ‘poetical fancy’ (Bate):
Along the meadow banks I rove
& down the flaggy fen
& hope my first & early love
To meet thee once agen
I can't expect to meet thee now
The winter floods begin
The wind sighs through the naked bough
Sad as my heart within
Although every day he is met by the same views that once entranced him, she is gone. Driven into himself, he finds his heart as bleak and forbidding a place as the early winter landscape. As Chilcott points out, ‘She is always present, but never there – not in Northborough, in his cottage, with him’.
Searching for something that could never appear, and with the void in his heart growing every day, the isolation within his soul felt like the abyss itself was inside him, eating away at his very existence.
I believe that Clare understood, at least partially that he would not be remaining in Northborough. The final four lines of ‘I think of thee…’ read like a prophetic utterance:
While life breaths on this earthly ball
What e'er my lot may be
Wether in freedom or in thrall
Mary I think of thee
The utter desolation within his mind was maddening but there was nothing he could do but to continue to live as a stranger in the Northborough cottage, dying slowly within and no doubt, becoming more and more estranged from Patty.
He might be able to move freely throughout the familiar countryside, but he was in thrall to a memory, and would soon be literally in thrall in Northampton General Asylum. As ‘fragmentary and disorganised’ (Bate) his work was in these final months of 1841, Clare somehow knew what was to happen in the near future. ‘The desolation is echoed in the few spare last stanzas of Child Harold’ (Chilcott):
But now loves hopes are all bereft
A lonely man I roam
& abscent Mary long hath left
My heart without a home
(Child Harold : lines 862-965)
3. A Thrall in Northampton
With these stark final lines, written in December 1841, the composition of Child Harold comes to an end:
But now loves hopes are all bereft
A lonely man I roam
& abscent Mary long hath left
My heart without a home
Just a few days later Clare is removed from the Northborough cottage to the Northampton General Asylum. Nevertheless, his Scriptural paraphrases continued right up to his removal, finishing with these prophetic (for Clare) lines from Isaiah 47v15:
Thy merchants from thy youth
They shall wander one & all
To his quarters & the truth
Shall leave thee more in thrall
Though slave dealers take thee
though bondsmen enslave thee
There's none shall be able to shield thee or save thee
Although rather changed from the text of the Authorised Version of the Bible that Clare knew, had memorised and loved, these words are dredged up from the depth of his subconscious and desolate state of mind; arguably a true reflection of his inner life at the end of this, the most difficult year of his life.
Obsessed as he is with the veracity of his memory of Mary, Clare finds himself dwelling on a biblical passage of doom and loss. Composing a long paraphrase of the prophecy, with that final denouement — ‘though bondsmen enslave thee’ — laying in wait. He finds himself writing a prophecy of his own judgment and removal.
I must admit that these poetic paraphrases, coupled with the final four lines of ‘I think of thee…’ to me do read like a prophetic utterance, a premonition of his of own fate.
While life breaths on this earthly ball
What e'er my lot may be
Wether in freedom or in thrall
Mary I think of thee
(Child Harold)
Shall leave thee more in thrall
Though slave dealers take thee
(Isaiah 47v15b)
In due course the ‘slave dealers’, in the form of Parson Glossop, Fenwick Skrimshire and William Page, arrive at the cottage and there are none able to shield him or save him, estranged as he was… ‘a stranger to his own family’.
Clare arrived at the asylum committed ‘After years addicted to poetical prossing’ (sic), and became in his own words, ‘a thrall’ — one who is enslaved, or in bondage.
However, it seems that in his own mind Child Harold was not complete, and the following 18 extra lines, were written in the early days of Clare’s incarceration in the asylum. Entitled by Clare ‘a continuation of Child Harold’:
Infants are but cradles for the grave
& death the nurse as soon as life begins
Time keeps accounts books for him & they save
Expences for his funeral out of sins
The stone is not put down—but when death wins
Churchyards are chronicles where all sleep well
The gravestones there as afterlives live in
Go search the Scriptures they will plainly tell
That God made heaven — Man himself the hell
There is a chasm in the heart of man
That nothing fathoms like a gulph at sea
A depth of darkness lines may never span
A shade unsunned in dark eternity
Thoughts without shadows — that eye can see
Or thought imagine tis unknown to fame
Like day at midnight such its youth to me
At ten years old it boyhoods secret came
Now manhoods forty past tis just the same
His dark mood continuing even though his treatment was kindly and sympathetic.
These 18 lines are interesting for another reason, and that relates to Clare’s Christian faith. In a few words Clare summarises the main message of the Old Testament of the Christian scriptures, concisely describing the awful consequences of mankind’s Fall: ‘The chasm’ separating Man from God; the ‘depth of darkness’ and ‘the shade unsunned’ in a Godless eternity.
What the boy realised at ten, the man has experienced to be true at ‘forty past’. For one who often usually avoided the public face of Christian practice, Clare exhibits a sound grasp of theology. It is as if Isaiah 47 was pursuing him even in the asylum:
All powerless thou to shun the doom
Or to avert the blow
To sudden desolation shalt thou go
& to the ruin which thou shalt not know
(Isaiah 47 paraphrase, lines 57-60)
As Greg Crossan, in his perceptive review of Sarah Houghton-Walker’s recent book ‘John Clare’s Religion’, comments (John Clare Society Journal 29, 2010):
‘Of particular interest… are the subtle changes to scripture that Clare made in some of his paraphrases… in such a way as to make the Old Testament trials and tribulations personal to his own circumstances, specifically his sense of exile and homelessness’. (my emphasis)
But his crushed mood could not last. Soon Clare is dwelling once again on his muse, on Mary. In these scraps, again written in the very early weeks of his incarceration we see that even in the depths of his despair, he was still haunted by his internal vision of his Glinton sweetheart.
Beautiful woman, visions dwell
Of heaven's joy about thee,
And every step I take is hell
That walks thro' life without thee.
Sweeter than roses was the face
For whom I pluck'd the flower;
Sweeter than heaven was the place
In that delightful hour.
Much was to follow of course. Within the protective atmosphere of the Northampton County Asylum, his mind was free to range over his whole life and experience. Perhaps we owe some of the profound and uplifting of his whole corpus to the fact that for the next 25 years he dwelt, thought and wrote under its protection.
4. On a Church-yard Stone
It is November 1848, and John Clare has been, in his own words, ‘in the madhouse’ in Northampton General Asylum for very nearly 7 years. Yet even after such a long period of separation, his fertile mind is still in Helpston and Glinton; and upmost in his thought is his youth and his two ‘wives’. Here is Ronald Blythe on his demeanour whilst incarcerated:
“The full Clare reader will also discover what poetry can say on the subject of what Clare called ‘thwarted love’. He took, as well as tragedy, the landscape he shared with his lover into captivity with him.” (Ronald Blythe - ‘Desertions’ from Borderland 2005)
Over the previous years whilst confined in the asylum, Clare had written numerous poems with a lot of different women in his thoughts. Certainly, Patty and Mary do surface in this work from time to time, but it is only in the autumn of 1848 that he seems, once again, to return in his mind the two women who haunt the whole corpus of his work.
In the October it was his wife Patty who was the subject of his verse:
O once I had a true love
As bless't as I could be
Young Patty was my turtle dove
And Patty she loved me
We walked the fields together
By wild roses and woodbine
In summers sunshine weather
And Patty she was mine
(Clare to his Wife, lines 1-8)
However, by mid-November he is once again dwelling on his ‘first wife’, Mary Joyce, in ‘Mary, A Ballad’, dated the 11th November 1848:
Love is past and all the rest
Thereto belonging fled away
The most esteemed and valued best
Are faded all and gone away
How beautiful was Mary's dress
While dancing at the meadow ball
—'Tis twenty years or more at least
Since Mary seemed the first of all
(Mary, A Ballad, lines 1-8)
I believe that “Love is past and all the rest” shows clearly his settled conviction that all was, in truth “faded all and gone away”. Somehow he had come to terms with the long avoided fact she was permanently gone, and that he had now to live in the light of that. Whilst still in Northborough he had, of course, heard the talk of Mary’s death, but refused at that terrible time for him to believe it.
The poem continues, but the reader unexpectedly encounters her death in the starkest of tones.
Lord how young bonny Mary burnt
With blushes like the roses hue
My face like water thrown upon't
Turned white as lilies i' the dew
(lines 9-12)
To come upon in line 9 the line “Lord how young bonny Mary burnt”, even if he is speaking of her blushes at their first meeting, is an astonishing shock for students of Clare’s work; Clare unconsciously(?) recording the manner of her death in the most shocking way imaginable.
Mary had, as Clare had been avoiding for so long, perished in the fire at her parent’s farm-house in Glinton on the 14th of July 1838. Her grave in the churchyard of St. Benedict’s Church, Glinton was, and is, clear for all to see.
What is certain, is that also in the October of 1848, his mind was filled again with memories of Mary and of their shared landscape; here is an extract from his poem ‘Childhood’ written at that time:
O dear to us ever the scenes of our childhood
The green spots we played in the school where we met
The heavy old desk where we thought of the wild-wood
Where we pored o'er the sums which the master had set
(Childhood, lines 1-4)
Then, one month later, in lines 13-16 of “Mary, A Ballad” we find Clare admitting that he had, in fact visited their old haunts in Glinton Church during his stay in Northborough:
When grown a man I went to see
The school where Mary's name was known
I looked to find it on a Tree
But found it on a low grave stone
The school where Mary's name was known
I looked to find it on a Tree
But found it on a low grave stone
(Mary, A Ballad, lines 13-16)
As is well attested, Clare and Mary had met at the school they both attended in Glinton church. Was the ‘Tree’ the place where their names were carved 30 years earlier in the Lady-Chapel of St. Benedict’s where the school met?
In support of this supposition, and clearly referred to in the lines above, is the “low grave stone”. Hard by the church is the grave stone where Mary’s name, although barely distinguishable 173 years later, was very clearly engraved in 1838:
But all is gone—and now is past
And still my spirits chill alone
Loves name that perished in the blast
Grows mossy on a church-yard stone
And still my spirits chill alone
Loves name that perished in the blast
Grows mossy on a church-yard stone
(Mary, A Ballad, lines 21-24)
Finally, for those who do not know this important poem from the work completed during the 25 years of his incarceration in Northampton General Asylum, here it is:
MARY
A Ballad
Love is past and all the rest
Thereto belonging fled away
The most esteemed and valued best
Are faded all and gone away
Thereto belonging fled away
The most esteemed and valued best
Are faded all and gone away
How beautiful was Mary's dress
While dancing at the meadow ball
—'Tis twenty years or more at least
Since Mary seemed the first of all
Since Mary seemed the first of all
Lord how young bonny Mary burnt
With blushes like the roses hue
My face like water thrown upon't
Turned white as lilies i' the dew
When grown a man I went to see
The school where Mary's name was known
I looked to find it on a Tree
But found it on a low grave stone
Now is past—was this the now
In fine straw-hat and ribbons gay
I'd court her neath the white thorn bough
And tell her all I had to say
But all is gone—and now is past
And still my spirits chill alone
Loves name that perished in the blast
Grows mossy on a church-yard stone
(11th November 1848)
Notes
The Early Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger (two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); III-IV (1998)
The Later Poems of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and Margaret Grainger (two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
Jonathan Bate (John Clare – A Biography)
Tim Chilcott (John Clare – The Living year 1841)
Incidentally, John Clare - The Living Year 1841 (Edited by Tim Chilcott) is invaluable for anyone interested in this most important of years in Clare’s life, and most particularly for the text of Child Harold as well as the rest of Clare’s 1841 output.
© Roger Rowe (2011)
