John clare themes. John Clare: Poetry Literary Elements 2022-10-30
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John Clare was an English poet who lived from 1793 to 1864. He is best known for his nature poetry, which often featured themes of loss, nostalgia, and the beauty of the natural world.
One of the main themes in Clare's poetry is the idea of loss and nostalgia. Many of his poems deal with the passage of time and the changes that occur in the natural world as a result. For example, in his poem "The Lament of Swordy Well," Clare writes about the loss of a beloved place that has been ruined by progress and development. The poem reflects the sense of melancholy and longing that Clare often felt for the past, and the sense of loss that came with the changes he saw in the world around him.
Another important theme in Clare's poetry is the beauty and majesty of the natural world. He was deeply inspired by the countryside of his native Northamptonshire, and many of his poems celebrate the beauty of the landscape and the creatures that lived there. In his poem "The Grasshopper," for example, Clare describes the joy and wonder he feels when he hears the song of the grasshopper on a summer's day. The poem captures the sense of wonder and appreciation that Clare had for the natural world, and the way it brought him joy and solace.
In addition to these themes, Clare's poetry also often deals with the theme of memory and the role it plays in shaping our sense of identity. Many of his poems explore the way that memories of the past inform our present selves, and the way that we carry those memories with us into the future. In his poem "The Flitting," for example, Clare writes about the sense of loss and sadness he feels when he has to leave his childhood home and move to a new place. The poem reflects the way that memories of the past can shape our present experiences, and the way that we carry those memories with us as we move forward in life.
Overall, John Clare was a deeply sensitive and observant poet who wrote about the natural world, loss, nostalgia, and memory with great insight and beauty. His poetry continues to be widely read and appreciated today, and his themes are still relevant and resonant for readers of all ages.
John Clare: Poetry Symbols, Allegory and Motifs
In the last stanzas of the poem Clare makes the association explicit: In these thy haunts Ive gleaned habitual love From the vague world where pride and folly taunts I muse and look above Thy solitudes The unbounded heaven esteems And here my heart warms into higher moods And dignifying dreams I see the sky Smile on the meanest spot Giving to all that creep or walk or flye A calm and cordial lot Thine teaches me Right feelings to employ That in the dreariest places peace will be A dweller and a joy These verses, with their longing for peaceful solitude and the benevolence of the open sky, find an echo, much later, when Clare comes to write, from the asylum in Northampton, his most desolate poem, I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman 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. Retrieved 12 July 2015. The first four stanzas introduce the main themes that echo through the whole poem: Lover of swamps The quagmire over grown With hassock tufts of sedge — where fear encamps Around thy home alone The trembling grass Quakes from the human foot Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass Where thou alone and mute Sittest at rest In safety neath the clump Of hugh flag forrest that thy haunts invest Or some old sallow stump Thriving on seams That tiney island swell Just hilling from the mud and rancid streams Suiting thy nature well Nowhere does Clare describe, or even name, the snipe. These minor matters are nevertheless central to his effects. Many early British settlers of America admired the beauty of the landscape, but sought to exterminate the Indigenous people who lived in it. Its fourteen lines are suggestive of a sonnet, but Clare breaks with tradition by employing his own rhyme scheme, which helps to capture the surprising features of the heath in its winter aspect.
Those familiar features of a John Clare poem, the trees and bushes, are dark to him even during broad daylight, because he cannot see clearly. As we discuss in the previous theme, love transforms his eyes from instruments for seeing into instruments for speaking. He had a first love, Mary Joyce to whom the poem was addressed to. Summary First Love" is a romantic poem written by John Clare. Clare's wind-blown landscape looks, and to some extent is, tidily constructed: it even boasts numbered stanzas. The speaker could be indoors in stanza one, watching from the window.
Clare argued with his editors about how it should be presented to the public. The poem "The Dying Child" similarly describes a dead child as merely asleep. Retrieved 22 July 2018. Though the poems may overstate what really happened, the strength of Clare's language encourages us to share in the intensity of the recounted experience while we read, and to see that there is a kind of spiritual reality to what Clare describes. The same goes for the rhyme scheme of the poem, which is ababcdcd in each of the three stanzas. Form and Meter Clare usually writes in iambs, or pairs of one unstressed and one stressed syllable. He went on to publish four collections of poetry about rural life.
This same conflict informs "First Love," which similarly depicts the speaker caught between ordinary life and the overwhelming and transformative experience of falling in love. . Born to virtually illiterate field laborers, Clare received only a basic education, and left school to work at the age of 12. First love is powerful and stays with us, but it can be painful as well as joyous or liberating. Most of his poems rhyme, but rhyme schemes differ from poem to poem.
Son of a semiliterate father and a wholly illiterate mother, he began life in terrible poverty. In "Love Lives Beyond the Tomb," he subtly alludes to the creation story by referencing "Eve's dews," gesturing towards Eve's responsibility for mankind being expelled from paradise and doomed to mortality. For example, "Autumn" ends when the world is bathed in golden light and the speaker suddenly experiences the countryside as a sublime, awe-inspiring place. He began to have delusions, added to a serious drinking problem, so his family placed him in an asylum. Delphi Complete Works of John Clare Illustrated. This brings us up short, and arguably mirrors the confusion the speaker is feeling as he plunges headlong into first love. He uses more heightened comparisons in "I Am! These poems usually described vast panoramas or extraordinary weather, with popular topics including the ocean, the mountains, and storms or tempests.
First, he is well known for his traditional love poetry, primarily addressed to his childhood crush Mary Joyce. The paradoxes at the beginning of the third stanza are another way Clare reinforces the sense of love as a totally different world; suddenly, flowers grow in winter, and beds are ice cold. These poems are often somewhat generic, as they replicate the conventions of love poetry in the period. There, Clare felt deeply alone, separate both from his childhood social world and the literary community he dabbled in as a young man. An example of this is "Evening". Retrieved 15 August 2012. Finally, it is shown that Clare's expression of his sense of isolation reveals a poet of diverse talents who is of great relevance to the modern sensibility.
Clare has organised his details, so that from stanza to stanza we have moved deeper into the countryside — from a position close to the cottage window, then, via the twirling leaf to the lane. However, John Clare was more than a nature poet. As John Clare wrote so often about nature, it comes as little surprise that he also turned his beautifully close attention to small details to the world of birds. John Clare wrote a number of poems expressing an intense pleasure in windy weather. In 1832, his friends and London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a Clare's last work, the Rural Muse 1835 , was noticed favourably by Clare was reported as being "full of many strange delusions".
Animal Personhood When John Clare writes about animals, he consistently gets inside their head. By using the form to profess his love for the natural world, he suggested that those feelings were just as profound as the love of one person for another. By adopting the perspective of much smaller creatures, these poems invite the reader to see the world in a new way. Clare's knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major In a foreword to the 2011 anthology The Poetry of Birds, the broadcaster and bird-watcher Tim Dee notes that Clare wrote about 147 species of British wild birds "without any technical kit whatsoever". These conflicts also reflect Clare's interest in the conflict between impermanence and eternity. The New York Review of Books. An altered ecology in a landscape now deserted by humans reveals those less domesticated, but, for Clare, not ominous, birds, the raven and the crow.
