Although John Clare was a peasant suffering from poverty all his life, his poetry was not written with a propagandistic but with an artistic purpose. The literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dealing with country life was either artistic or social in purpose. Ebenezer Elliott, living at the sane time as Clare, wrote poems with a social purpose—for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the lowering of the import duties on raw material. Although Elliott was actually benefitted by the Corn Laws, yet he wrote against them most bitterly. John Clare, on the other hand, impoverished all his life by the Corn Laws and other similar measures, wrote nothing dealing with a change in the agricultural situation. Both writers are to be praised for their honesty, for their ability to detach themselves from immediate personal interests, and for their fidelity to their artistic and social purposes.
The poems of Clare may be divided into three classes: the Love Poems, the Nature Poems, and the Poems dealing with social life. In all the poet’s writings he is dominated by an artistic purpose rather than by a desire to reform or change conditions. We should expect this to be so in the Love Poems, which form the bulk of his work. Yet, we may learn something of the country life from these poems, if we take them, written by a peasant as they are, to be typical of the sentiments felt by all the rural laborers. In spite of the material hardships and privations, there is a simplicity and sweetness in the peasant’s love, an inner life of tender emotions and warmth of feeling, that is in stark contrast with external hardships. Clare, in the love poems, expresses these sentiments of the peasant. The poem best illustrating the simple love is one entitled, “My Love, thou art a Nosegay Sweet.”—
And when, my Nosegay, thou shalt die, And heaven’s flower shall prove thee; My hopes shall follow to the sky, And everlasting love thee.
The ballad entitled “William and Mary,” { 15} in which two rural swains are talking of their sweethearts, shows an elevated emotion and respect for the objects of their love, that is deep felt and natural.
I strive to please her morning, noon, and night. . . . . . . . . . . . . . For her in harvest when the nuts are brown, I take my crook to pull the branches down. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The garland and the wreath for her I bind Compos’d of all the fairest flowers I find.