By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
John Clare (1793-1864) is often overlooked in accounts of Romantic poetry, but he wrote sensitively and originally about the English countryside and his poetry displays a fine eye for local detail. He is regarded by some as the finest nature poet in the English language. His poem ‘Autumn’ showcases his rare talents, and repays closer analysis: consider the wonderful line ‘Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun’.
Autumn
The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.
The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.
Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we’re eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
And whilst a line like ‘The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread’ would not be out of place in a schoolchild’s first attempt at poetry, the simile now striking us as perhaps a little too obvious, the image of the fallow fields glittering like water – their surface shimmering in the sun like the surface of a lake or the sea – is inspired.
There’s also a glorious sense of play, particularly in the internal rhymes: having ‘iron’ soften into the verb ‘eying’ in that final stanza, for example, or ‘mounting’ giving way to ‘fountain’ in that first stanza, and tantalising us with the possibility of ‘mountain’ – under pressure from that ‘hill’ – a word which never appears. This is John Clare the joyful, playful poet who found such wonder and delight in the natural world, and who could put into words the smallest details of the season in a way that is immediately recognisable.
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Love this poem. Good stuff.
There seems to be a surprise at the end – Eternity comes as a shock, a sudden thought not heralded by what went before. Where did it come from? I think it came from the gradual change from the mostly natural, almost unassuming, description, in stanzas 1 and 2, to more resplendent colours and references, the unnatural colouring reminiscent of a Russian icon, in the last stanza. We should have known that Eternity was coming, we should have spotted it!