John Clare's Words

Clare is a phenomenon in English literature, not because he went insane (which he probably did not), or because he was very poor and worked in the fields, nor because he was disadvantaged and had a limited formal education, but because he was rooted in English traditions that were rapidly being destroyed.  Much has been made of Clare's ‘unusualness’, including his differences from other English poets, but a close examination of his writings reveals how much he shared with poets before him in his knowledge of folk-rituals, folk-ceremonies, religion, nature, politics, and in song.  He is also a product of Tyndale and the English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare.

His passion for words centred on nursery-rhymes and fairy-stories, and the games of his childhood.  His political knowledge was rooted in Langland, Chaucer, Bunyan and much 16^th and 17^th century poetry.  Clare's political experience was based in his poverty and the tyranny of petty local officialdom and social prejudice.  His language was that of village streets, fairs and fields – it is the English of ale, song, field labour, and the village and parish church.  Clare is as interested in the language employed by village ladies as that used by village rat-catchers.  It is the language of proverb and of popular, often vulgar rhyme.  Clare is a bone-of-the-bone rural English labourer and it is this, which gives such strength to his words.

Though he lived nearly all of his life in Northamptonshire, he had exposure to dialects other than those of his immediate surrounds.  Even if he had not, county boundaries are not reliable guides to divisions of language.  He made occasional visits to London where he mixed with the gentry, the literati of the day and with the varied working class denizens of the metropolis.  He met a variety of people – clerks, inn-keepers, shopkeepers, poets and painters including Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats friend Reynolds, and publishers like Gifford, Taylor and Hessey.

Yet in his own family background, he had another linguistic heritage – the language of the Scots – from his grandfather who seduced Clare's grandmother and promptly ran away.  All his life, Clare saw Scotland as a land of freedom.  Clare read Burns, Allan Cunningham, Walter Scott, Alan Ramsey and Robert Henryson.  Many of the poems he wrote in the Northampton County Asylum were written in ‘Lallans’ (Lowlands), a form of Scots used in the ballads sold by peddlers in inns, fairs and the village street.  But even before his incarceration, there were traces of Scots in Clare's writings.

Yet many Clare scholars seem to know little about Clare’s use of language, his linguistic inheritance, or his experiments with language, let alone the breadth of his reading, his political, religious, and musical culture, or what might be called today his ‘popular culture’.   Probably because of the immense difficulties of the manuscripts themselves, the ignorance of many literary academics about Clare’s work, and the newness of this field of study. 

As no doubt you all know, we have been, from the start of our work on Clare, advocates of making a few alterations to Clare’s language as possible.  There is an unfortunate tendency among some Clare scholars to regard every ‘misspelling’ in Clare’s work as an example of his illiteracy.  The truth is quite otherwise.  Resorting more often to the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ (OED) will show that Clare often uses a word in its dialect or an obsolete form.  Not only does this alter the ‘smell’ of the word but it also modifies its meaning.  Clare often used words that he employs in his own speech and that he heard every day in the village street.  For instance, the man who repairs a roof-covering made from straw or reeds is a ‘thacker’, not a ‘thatcher’.  Such a man uses a variety of ‘thacking’ tools, known today only to a specialist in such work, but common knowledge to every agricultural labourer of Clare’s time.

Interestingly enough, some of the ancient spellings and pronounciations of rural England have survived in modern America.  We can therefore find in Clare’s writings, words of mixed derivation, words such as were used by many families that in Clare's time were emigrating to America.  Clare himself considered emigrating to America, but could not bear to leave his beloved Helpstone to do so, yet he did write a sympathetic poem about an ‘Irish immigrant’.  So it is clear that Clare is an important source, one of very few, for finding words that were commonly used in Eastern and Northern England, as well as in Scotland, during his lifetime.

One word will illustrate this well, a word that achieved fame through Seamus Heaney’s essay entitled ‘John Clare’s ‘prog’ ‘.  Ironically, and unknown we believe to Mr. Heaney, the word is recorded in the ‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ (DARE) as both a noun and a verb with different spellings: prog, progue, proggle, and proag together with other forms, progger, progger, progueing iron (or stick).  As a noun, it may mean:

1.     A stick or pole intended for poking, probing, or snagging (OED 2 1615).  In this sense, it is ‘a long wooden pole with an iron point on one end and a hook on the other’.  It can be used for searching out snapping turtles from the mud;

2.    As a sharp pointed stick to get oxen to move; or

3.    As a stick to seek out crabs on the shore-line.

Thence it comes to mean, as a verb, to prowl about in search of something, that search may be for food or for any kind of pickings, thus the word sometimes means the ‘food’ discovered by poking about.  In Chesapeake Bay, clam diggers are, in the 21^st century, still known as ‘proggers’.

In Clare's poem ‘The Field Mouse’, the poet is poking about at harvest time, probably in the last part of the field that has not yet been mowed:

I found a ball of grass among the hay

And progged it as I passed and went away;

And when I looked I fancied something stirred,

And turned again and hoped to catch the bird—

When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats

With all her young ones hanging at her teats;

She looked so odd and so grotesque to me,

I ran and wondered what the thing could be,

And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood;

Then the mouse hurried from the craking brood.

The young ones squeaked, and as I went away

She found her nest again among the hay.

The water o'er the pebbles scarce could run

And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.

Seamus Heaney's essay seems to suggest that Clare was the inventor of the word, “Once upon a time John Clare was lured to the edge of his word-horizon and his tonal horizon, looked about him eagerly, tried out a few new words and accents and then, wilfully and intelligently, withdrew and dug in his local heels.” (p.64)

Yet OED’s earliest quotation of the word ‘prog’ as a verb is 1566.  As a noun, 1615 is the earliest quoted date.  It is a wonderful word, but its history goes back for at least a couple of centuries before Clare.  A simple reference to the two dictionaries mentioned in this essay confirms that much of “Clare's vocabulary” – ‘prog’ is a mere example - owes rather more to his encyclopaedic knowledge of English speech and idioms, gained in the way briefly outlined, than simply the language of his peers in North Northamptonshire.   ‘Progging’ is a good scholarly activity and may turn up more than a pregnant field-mouse.

Clare made regular use of disctionaries and glossaries.  Anne Baker used examples from Clare for her ‘Glossary of Northampton Words and Phrases’.   For example: ‘c o n t r o u l’ for ‘control’, ‘c h u s e’ for ‘choose’.  Yet many seem to think that it is pedantic, even ‘texually primitive’ to keep Clare’s language as written, which is why they have to defend Clare’s first editors when they tried, half-heartedly and unconvincingly, to turn Clare amazing use of language into standard London speech.

Look carefully at Clare’s rhyming-schemes and you will immediately see why it is undesirable to alter his spellings; the pronunciation of words and the stress-distribution of words of critical importance.   How often have most of us strumbled over ‘wind’ and ‘wind’?  If the word is in the middle of a line there may be no problem, though, even there, if there is also the same word in the rhyme-scheme, the inconsistency becomes irritating.

          “The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow”

may be perfectly acceptable, but what if the following lines were

          “The streets are ice-lined

          By the bitter north wind”  (forgive our awful couplet)

In Clare’s poetry we find some interesting examples of rhyme-schemes.  He is often scruplous in indicating the pronounciation need in, for example, the word ‘again’ which he often uses.  If the word is spelled a-g-a-i-n, then it will rhyme with a word like ‘stain’.  If it is spelled ‘a-g-e-n’, it will rhyme with a word like ‘men’.  This would seem to indicate that Clare wanted his rhymes to be true rhymes (not just “eye rhymes”).

Consider these examples:

Leaveing th'unfinishd tale in pain
Soon as evening comes again
(‘Summer Evening’, lines 177-8)

In our short search of Clare’s work, we have found him to have rhymed ‘again’ with pain, vain, plain, lain, & remain.

Shall be a Bed till morn agen
And so I'll sing no more till then
(‘My Rover’, lines 90-1)

Again a short seach reveals ‘agen’ rhymed with then, den, sen’, and ten.

On the whole we are inclined to believe that Clare was genuinely concerned about his rhymes and that therefore we ought to pay careful attention to any ‘apparent’ discrepancies in spelling.  In the Eastern-English dialects pronounciation of such a words as ‘concern’ is closer to ‘consarn’.  Hence Clare’s spellings of such words as mercy (marcy), servant (sarvant), certain (sartin), clergy (clargy), (e)ternal (‘tarnal), serpent (sarpent), and so on.  All these incidentally, still survive in East Anglia and in the Appalachian Mountains!

The Derby horse race is still ‘the Darby’ to this day, and the word that English sailors use for the ‘stern’ of a ship, is still the ‘starn’ in Devon and Cornwall.

As interesting as such individual words may be, the large categories of words used by Clare (and preserved in the United States) are even more intruiguing.  For example, Clare always preferred the homely country names for plants, flowers, bushes, trees, etc., to the Linnean nomenclature.  But in some ways the lexicographical botanists have been more helpful to us than the full-time professional botanists with their preference for Linnean nomenclature.

For some while we have thought that scientists, for example, are less prissy about sexual language than humanists, despite humanists’ profession of openness.  Those who are closer to nature – whether landworkers, hunters or herbalists – are likely to be more open about sex (and to take things and people for what they are) than the co-called educationalists.  Clare uses a range of language about sex in his ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Child Harold’ (for example) that still shocks some readers today.  He is sometimes excused for his sexual language by the explanation that he was, after all, mad when he wrote his asylum poems.   We beg to differ.

The truth is that from the start, in some of his earliest poems, there is an openness about sex that reflects the physical nature and the sexual context of his rural life.  This part of Clare’s nature has been largely concealed until quite recently, but was helpfully pointed out by Rowe and Lee in ‘The Poet in Love’ (Arbour Editions, 2014): “It is perfectly obvious that his ‘vision’, even when writing of his soon-to-be wife, was somewhat more carnal, fleshy and voluptuous than his advisors thought fitting.”  Resulting in the omission of such poems from any of the collections published in his lifetime.  An interesting exception is a poem published in ‘The Village Minstrel’ (Vol 1, p82) “To an early cowslip”, the obvious meaning of which seems to have entirely missed by Taylor and Hessey:

Cowslip bud so early peeping
Warmd by aprils hazard hours
Oer thy head tho sunshines creeping
Hind it threatnd tempests lower

Trembling blossom let me bear thee
To a better safer home
Tho a fairer blossom wear thee
Near a tempest there shall come

Marys bonny breasts to charm thee
Bosom soft as down can be
Eyes like any suns to warm thee
& scores of sweets unknown to me
Ah for joys thoult there be meeting
In a station so divine
Id ‘most wish thats vain repeating
Cowslip bud thy life were mine

Wishful thinking on Clare’s part perhaps, as it seems unlikely that his love for Mary Joyce was never physically consummated.  Certainly by the time he met Patty in 1818 he was seeking a rather more physical love, and the voluptuous Patty being a willing participant.   

This part of Clare’s nature has been concealed by generations of his publishers by bowing to the puritanical nature of ‘respectable’ readers of the British, upper and middle-class; those who actually bought volumes of poetry.  As Lee remarks, “… we have become increasingly aware that his often apparently innocent references to flowers in their various states have sexual connotations not at first perceived.”  Would we edit similar texts from the works of Shakespeare?  Not yet, but we have been doing so for two hundred years to Clare.

Even in punctuation – and Clare was not an enthusiast for full-stops, commas, colons, semi-colons or apostrophes – what seems to us to be an examply of his illiteracy is often standard punctuation for an educated man of his time; e.g. it’s, your’s, their’s – a habit that seems to be creeping back into the written language of students. 

It has to be remembered that Clare has a wide acquaintance with specialised vocabularies – he knows the language of the hedger, the ditcher, the thatcher, the ploughman, the shepherd and the cowman – yet also the language of the clergyman, the school-teacher and the gentleman -- paralleled by the language of the ‘ranter-preacher’, the village school-master and the pretentious local lawyer.

 © Professor Eric Robinson & Roger Rowe (2016)