Nature Boy

So often, I have been slow to recognize good work. I came late to R.S. Thomas, though I knew of his poetry years ago. Other late discoveries that make me feel foolish and dull: George Santayana, J.F. Powers, Anthony Trollope, Penelope Fitzgerald – and especially John Clare. What I knew was the misleading reputation of the poet rather than Clare himself. Stray, half-remembered mentions of Clare in Edward Blunden, Patrick Kavanagh and Theodore Roethke – the latter mistakenly lumping him with Smart and Blake – led me to lazily pigeonhole him among the romantically insane.

Jonathan Bate, in John Clare (2003), one of my favorite biographies of recent years, changed all that. Published at the same time was “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Bate, who gives us a delightful poet teetering between minor and major status. In “Pastoral Poetry,” first published decades after his death, which occurred 142 years ago today, Clare wrote aptly of his own work:

“So would I my own mind employ
And my own heart impress
That poesy’s self’s a dwelling joy
Of humble quietness.”

Clare is the truest nature poet among his contemporaries. He knew more about cowslips and badgers than Keats and Shelley combined. He worked as a farm laborer, and was so desperately poor for most of his life that he sometimes could not afford paper. He spent more than 20 of his final years in lunatic asylums.

How pleased I was to learn that R.S. Thomas was an admirer of Clare and his work. Here’s how Bate describes the reverence of one poet for another:

“But he remains above all the poets’ poet. R.S. Thomas, the Anglo-Welsh poet and priest who served in parishes among a North Wales peasantry whose working lives were not so very far from the world of Clare’s own community, began his tribute poem by making the traditional link between lunacy and the moon. Written for the 1993 bicentenary of Clare’s birth, which coincided with Thomas’s own eightieth year, the poem elides the full moon and the high forehead of the balding dome of the older Clare’s head in the 1844 Grimshaw portrait. It then looks back to the youthful Clare whose feeling for nature was the purest kind of love. In the vision of R.S. Thomas, the lunatic, the lover and the poet are indeed of imagination all compact:

“`Young, he was in his own
sky, rising at mornings
over unbrushed dew,
with no-one to introduce
him to earth’s bustling creatures
but his love. It was love
brought him, as it brings
all of us in the end, face
against glass, to demand
brokenly of the anonymous: Who am I?’

“But even during the long asylum years Clare knew – at least he knew for most of the time – who he was:

“`A silent man in life’s affairs
A thinker from a boy
A Peasant in his daily cares
The Poet in his joy.’”

Genius often recognizes genius before the rest of us do. I remember reading a few years ago that Arnold Schoenberg admired Duke Ellington immensely, which was doubly pleasing for me because I admire both of them. The same is true of Thomas and Clare. By the way, the Thomas poem, “Lunar,” comes from No Truce with the Furies, and the Clare lines come from his poem “The Peasant Poet.”