Mildred M. Coen

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes his poverty and his cares, sometimes drink, sometimes starvation, prevented him from writing at all. Out under the open sky he felt free. “There was a favorite spot where he delighted to sit, and where the hallowed vein of poetry flowed freely. ”

“ Autumn, with corn gleanings and merry tales, brings its joy and feasts. As the old women gather the last of the harvest, they get over-heated. Stopping to catch their breath, they amuse the children with stories or Jack the Giant-Killer, Cincerilla, and Thumbs. ”

“ About forty years before the birth of the Poet Clare, (1793) there began in England a land revolution which by the end of the eighteenth century pauperized a great part of the rural population. Up until 1750 fully half of the land of England was worked in “common”, or in accordance with what was known as the open field system. This open field system means that there were special fields set aside for plow land. These fields were divided into very small strips which were alternately cultivated and left unplowed. ”

“ In a reflective mood, he sees into the eternal mysteries of nature, beneath the forms and symbols of outward appearances. Cowslips of golden blooms will come and go as fresh two thousand years from now as they are today. ”

“ Besides this plow land, there was a definite area of grazing land, known as the commons. With the coming of enclosures this open field system was abolished. (By the term ‘enclosure’ is meant that all the strips of any one man scattered throughout the holdings of the village were given to him in equivalent in a single, consolidated acreage, which he had to fence, ditch, etc. Or again, the term applies to a large district, as very frequently the commons, that was fenced in for the wealthy landowner’s sheep-pens.) ”

“ The laborer, to keep from starving, often turned to poaching and petty thievery. But the noblemen had their parks enclosed against trespassers. Spring-guns were set up on the estates. Poaching offenses were made punishable by death, or at the least by transportation to Australia. The poor might seek charity from the parish pauper work-house. Or they might starve.
Many reforms to better these conditions were proposed, mainly because the English Aristocracy had just seen in a sister nation what a desperate proletariat could do if pushed to extremes of misery. ”

“ A great part of the land, moreover, that was enclosed was turned to pasture by the large owners, and the laborers formerly employed on it were discharged. Where fifteen men farmed, one man herded. The cottager and the laborer were thus made dependent on wages alone at a time when competition for work was beating wages down to a starvation level. ”

“ Just as today the small manufacture has no chance against the big one in his line, so then the small landowner could not compete against the wealthy ones, especially since new and expensive machinery and fertilizers were becoming more and more essential. ”

“ 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 p. ”

“ The wealthy landowners improved their estates so that they might raise the rent and make a profit that could be compared to the profit made by the fast-rising merchant aristocracy. The rent on these improved farms was so high that the small farmer had to give up farming altogether. The commons were enclosed and in a majority of the cases went to p. 3the wealthy landowners who raised a better grade of sheep with heavier wool on the pasturage thus afforded: but the small farmer and in fact all the rest of the agricultural population did not have a place to graze a cow. ”

“ But the change was too rapid and altered the character of the national life of England to such a degree that it wrought untold hardships for more than half a century. The people of the villages were robbed of the barest means of making a living. ”

“ His country laborer, working on some enclosed farm, is a religious man, not the drunken ignorant peasant who spends his few pennies at some tavern while his wife and children starve. This laborer, Clare depicts going out with his children on a Sunday afternoon. ”

“ The process of enclosing their allottments after the consolidation mentioned, was so expensive that it could not be borne except by a man with some capital to start on. The man who was called upon by the enclosing committee to promptly ditch and fence his little land, and who could not do so, was compelled to sell at whatever price he could get. The small farmer of thirty acres might possibly have borne this expense but he received no adequate recompense for his rights of common ”