Last of the summer wine

As the warm September sun begins to wane, John Lewis-Stempel visits John Clare's grave, where he laments the sad demise of Nature's favourite son and wonders why the peasant poet's genius was never fully appreciated during his lifetime

- John Lewis-Stempel

The graves of those we loved, 
How beautiful they lie;
From every care and strife removed;
Beneath heavens canopy.
'The Churchyard', John Clare

IT was a family affair, a gathering of my wife’s clan, and the route took us within a couple of miles of Helpston. So, not for the first time, and probably not for the last, I visited John Clare’s grave. Not quite a pilgrimage, but a paying of respects, because we can never pay our dues to Clare, the one true voice of Nature from the English countryside (‘We will not plunder music of his dower’, July 12). It spoke through him, he was its tribune. ‘I found the poems in the fields/And only wrote them down,’ Clare once penned, a statement usually parsed by literary critics to prove the poet’s self-conscious, humble-born insecurity when he compared himself with fellow Romantic poets, the bourgeois-born Wordsworths, the faintly squirearchical Shelleys. Strip away the lichen encrustation of academic critical ana-lysis, however, and Clare was being both arch and literal, a proper pawky peasant: he knew his ability to craft verse. He knew also that, so close was his communion with the flowers, the birds, the animals around his Northamptonshire village in the Georgian century, that he could transcribe their voices, articulate their lives in truths. You can see this in The Skylark, where the bird, after it ‘winnows the air’ (a perfect threshing image of its beating wings), does ‘drop agen/To nests upon the ground, which anything/May come atto destroy’.