John Clare's Autumn

I am moved by the tragic life of the delicate and vulnerable Northamptonshire labourer-poet, John Clare (1793-1864). Yet, despite his hardships, his poetry is so life-affirming, celebrating nature in all its forms.

Autumn

I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the glossy elm tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane.

I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve,
The sparrow on the cottage rig,
Whose chirp would make believe
That Spring was just now flirting by
In Summer's lap with flowers to lie.

I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the naked trees,
The pigeons nestled round the cote
On dull November days like these;
The cock upon the dunghill crowing,
The mill sails on the heath a-going.

The feather from the raven's breast
Falls on the stubble lea,
The acorns near the old crow's nest
Drop pattering down the tree;
The grunting pigs, that wait for all,
Scramble and hurry where they fall.

JOHN CLARE

Walking, Art And Nature (10)



Camino, Spain


I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. THOREAU Walking

The political philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) believed that human beings were inherently good, and that they were only corrupted by the evils of society. He gradually lived an ever simpler life, becoming closer and closer to nature, studying botany, and enjoying the solitary walks he recounted in his ten, classic meditations Reveries Of The Solitary Walker.

Walking, art and nature - these three things are so bound up in Rousseau, and, since his time, have been inextricably linked.  



Camino, Spain

Walking, art and nature. We think of Thoreau's ecstasies in Walden and in his Journals; the mystical outpourings of Richard Jefferies in The Story Of My Heart; William Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'; the labourer-poet John Clare's walks among the dispossessed pastures of English agricultural history; Gary Syder's Beat and Buddhist mountain treks; Richard Mabey's gentle, literary eco-strolls through the Chilterns and Norfolk; Robert Macfarlane's explorations on foot of Britain's wild places; John Constable walking and painting in Dedham Vale; JMW Turner walking and painting in Europe.    



Camino, Spain

As well as walking in nature being an inspiration for art and literature, walking itself can be an art form in its own right. Richard Long, whom I've written about before, gives walking a totemic resonance through natural artworks created on the walk, or even through the signature of the actual walk itself: its mark, footprint and track across the landscape.

 

Camino, Spain

Sadly (for me at least!) I've reached the end of my ten-part journey through walking country. I hope some of it has been inspirational, or at least informative. Most of all I hope that's it's motivated you to go walking, or, if you're walkers already (which I know many of you are), to go walking even more. It's a land without class, without prejudice, without materialism, without competition, without complication, without compromise, without celebrity culture, without bonds. Rousseau famously wrote at the beginning of The Social Contract: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Why don't you throw off those chains, and start walking?



Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain



Here's the Roman arch at Caparra in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I walked under it nearly a year ago on my pilgrimage along the Via de la Plata. Why don't you join me as I step beneath it again, right now? Let's walk together towards those distant hills, that blue horizon. You never know what we might find... 

Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain

Talkers And Dreamers

There had never been anything wrong in my life that a few good days in the wilderness wouldn't cure. PAM HOUSTON

Richard Mabey, one of our foremost English nature writers and compiler of Flora Britannica (about the folklore of British plants), published in 2005 a highly personal memoir called Nature Cure which documented his nervous breakdown. His recovery is closely bound up with his rediscovery of and reconnection with the natural world. He says this about language and nature: It is as if in using the facility of language, the thing we believe most separates us from nature, we are constantly pulled back to its, and our, origins... Learning to write again was what finally made me better - and I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it... Culture isn't the opposite or contrary of nature. It's the interface between us and the non-human world, our species' semi-permeable membrane. This is in fact similar to what The Grizzled Scribe was saying in his comment on my post from yesterday.

Mabey cites various writers who have explored this 'interface' - Aldo Leopold, Henry Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and the poet John Clare, of whom he writes: Clare was one of the few writers... to have created a language that joined rather than separated nature and culture. I would also add the name of Edward Abbey to this list - for out of the wild anarchy and bitter irony, the anguish and contradictoriness of Desert Solitaire, comes a plea for the absolute necessity and importance of wilderness, and an appeal for a true, universal 'civilization' rather than the one-sided, prejudiced, short-sighted 'culture' of a particular society in a particular tiime and place (when his book was published, in the 1960s, issues such as overpopulation, nuclear catastrophe, industrial tourism and the destruction of wilderness were very much on Abbey's mind). Through his brilliant writing, through his words, thoughts and ideas, Abbey demonstrates (to me at any rate) very much a 'civilized' mind - pointing out as he does the gulf between mankind and nature, and hinting how it may be possible to bridge it.

Yes, language and imagination are quite definitely natural products of human evolution, and may be used by poets, by writers, by all of us in order to reconnect with the natural world, a world we lost in the Garden of Eden after the Fall from Grace (if we choose to see it in these mythological terms). As Mabey writes: We have evolved as talkers and dreamers. That is our niche in the world, something we can't undo. But can't we see those very skills as our way back, rather than the cause of our exile?

In summation of the rather difficult subject I've tried to tackle in these last few posts (hopefully I haven't tied myself in too many knots!) I'll quote Gary Snyder from his book Unnatural Writing: Consciousness, mind and language are fundamentally wild. 'Wild' as in wild ecosystems - richly interconnected, interdependent and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient and full of information... Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world. All our literatures are leavings, of the same order as the myths of wilderness people who leave behind only stories and a few stone tools. Other orders of being have their own literature. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer, with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains, a bit of piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.

Crab Blossoms

John Clare (1793-1864) was born in Helpston, Northamptonshire, the son of a semi-literate labourer. Clare himself later worked in various manual country trades. But he never recovered from an unhappy love affair with a local farmer's daughter called Mary Joyce. In 1820 he left the countryside for London where several volumes of his poetry were published. Here he unfortunately he suffered severe bouts of melancholy and depression. This led to his admission to an asylum in Epping in 1837. He escaped in 1841 and walked all the way back to Northamptonshire under the delusion that he was married to Mary and was returning home to be reunited with her. Actually she had died, unmarried, a few years previously. He was again taken away, this time to an asylum in Northampton, where he died in 1864.

The Crab Tree

Spring comes anew and brings each little pledge

That still as wont my childish heart deceives

I stoop again for violets in the hedge

Among the ivy and old withered leaves

And often mark amid the clumps of sedge

The pooty [snail] shells I gathered when a boy

But cares have claimed me many an evil day

And chilled the relish that I had for joy

Yet when crab blossoms blush among the may

As wont in years gone by I scramble now

Up mid the bramble for my old esteems

Filling my hands with many a blooming bough

Till the heart-stirring past as present seems

Save the bright sunshine of those fairy dreams...

From The Crab Tree by John Clare. The crab apple tree in our own garden is now displaying its reddish-pink blossom (see photo).