Clare Country
The Peasant Poet's Book
John Clare was born in Helpston in 1793 and spent his life writing the fields, heaths and hedgerows on Peterborough's northern edge. Open the book, choose a poem, and find the place it came from.
Poems of
John Clare
Helpston · 1793–1864
Poems in this collection
First Love
Written for Mary Joyce, the farmer's daughter from Glinton whom Clare loved as a boy and never stopped writing about. Glinton's needle spire recurs across his work like a fixed point on the horizon.
I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.
Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
Not love's appeals to know.
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.
The Nightingale's Nest
Clare tracked nesting birds with the patience of a field naturalist decades before the discipline had a name. This poem walks the reader into the wood and then, deliberately, stops short of disturbing the nest.
Emmonsales Heath
Open heathland north-west of Helpston, and one of the last unenclosed commons Clare knew. Fragments of this landscape survive in the limestone grassland reserves around Barnack and Castor.
The Lament of Swordy Well
A quarry given its own voice, protesting at what has been taken from it. The site Clare called Swordy Well is Swaddywell Pit, still reachable on foot from Helpston and now managed as a nature reserve.
Remembrances
A roll-call of vanished landmarks — Langley Bush, Round Oak, Swordy Well — lost to the enclosure of Helpston's open fields. Clare names them so that they cannot be quietly forgotten.
The Mores
The clearest account in English of what enclosure felt like from below: open ground fenced, paths closed, a whole way of moving through a landscape made illegal within a single generation.
Helpston Green
An early poem about the loss of the village green and its trees. Clare's birthplace on Woodgate is now John Clare Cottage, open to visitors with its restored garden and orchard.
I Am
Written in the asylum at Northampton in his last years, and the poem most readers meet first. Clare was returned to Helpston for burial in 1864, in the churchyard of St Botolph's.