LEAFING through my copy of Charles Causley’s Collected Poems, I came upon his moving poem “At the Grave of John Clare”. This was timely, as it happened to be the anniversary of Clare’s birth 232 years ago in Helpston.
There is always something moving about these posthumous encounters between poets, especially when both poets are as linked as these two to their own land and landscapes, and both, as these two, are poets who emerged not from the privileged or “cultured” classes, but from folk born far from the salons and coteries of literary London.
Causley’s poem starts with just that close observation, that noticing of tiny details, of which Clare was a master: “Walking in the scythed churchyard, around the locked church, Walking among the oaks and snails and mossed inscriptions. . .”
He goes on to quote the mossed inscription on Clare’s grave: “There were no flowers for the dead plowman. . . Only the words: A poet is born not made.”
Reading those lines, two other encounters in that same place came to my mind. One was in a moving piece by the poet, journalist, and songwriter Alan Franks, who wrote, on visiting the same spot: “Over the years the tribute on the stone, ‘A poet is born not made’, fell victim to the spread of lichen . . . until the final letter was almost indecipherable, and you could be forgiven for reading that a poet is born not mad. Whatever the truth of that, it touched a sensitive area since Clare’s life had been blighted by bouts of severe mental illness, involving episodes of despair and delusion. . .” (alanfranks.org/tag/john-clare)
Perhaps it is true that Clare was born “not mad”: that the breakdown of his mental health was visited on him from without, just as the depredations and enclosures against which he protested were visited on the land that he loved. He certainly identified himself with the land itself, and spoke in its voice, or let its voice speak through him, as he did in his “The Lament of Swordy Well”:
I am Swordy Well a piece of land
That’s fell upon the town
Who worked me till I couldn’t stand
And crush me now I’m down.
Yet it was, in part, that crushing that forced the poetry out of him and gave voice to the land’s lament.
The other poet’s encounter with Clare was one that I was told of personally. Eamon Duffy once told me of the day when, at the poet’s request, he took Seamus Heaney out to Helpston, and they stood together at Clare’s grave. Afterwards, when they signed the visitors’ book in the church, Heaney wrote “born and made”!
He was right, of course. He, and Causley, and Clare, all three, were born with rare gifts, born with poetic vision and imagination. But all three of them were also made, made and shaped by their time and place, by war, by social oppression, by troubles and violence, by “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. But, also, all three of them were made by the land and landscapes of their childhood, the mute places to which they gave words.
