By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
John Clare (1793-1864) has been called the greatest nature poet in the English language (by, for instance, his biographer Jonathan Bate), and yet his life – particularly his madness and time inside an asylum later in his life – tends to overshadow his poetry.
So here we’ve picked ten of John Clare’s best poems which offer an introduction to his idiosyncratic style and wonderful eye for detail, especially concerning the natural world.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Solitary Reaper’ is one of Wordsworth’s best-known poems. Although it’s a ballad, it didn’t appear in Wordsworth’s most famous collection, Lyrical Ballads, because he wrote it after the publication of that volume (co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge) in 1798. ‘The Solitary Reaper’ appeared in Wordsworth’s 1807 collection Poems in Two Volumes. The poem has received a fair bit of critical analysis; here, we offer some notes towards a commentary on it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Kendal and Windermere Railway was first proposed in 1844, and opened in 1847. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) opposed the building of a railway in his beloved Lake District, believing it would destroy the beauty of the landscape. Before we offer some words of analysis, here’s a reminder of the poem, ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, which he wrote in opposition to the proposed railway.
On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway
Is then no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown
In youth, and ’mid the busy world kept pure
As when their earliest flowers of hope were blown,
Must perish; – how can they this blight endure?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ belongs to a small suite of poems William Wordsworth wrote about ‘Lucy’, a girl or young woman (her precise age is difficult to determine); along with ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (which does not mention Lucy by name) and ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’, ‘Strange fits of passion’ appeared in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the volume Wordsworth co-wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Strange fits of passion I have known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover’s ear alone,
What once to me befel.
When she I loved was strong and gay,
And like a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath the evening Moon.
Upon the Moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea:
My Horse trudged on—and we drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Cradle Song’ is intended to be sung by a mother to her newborn child in order to lull the baby to sleep. The repetition of ‘Sweet’ at the beginning of many of the poem’s stanzas (or perhaps we should say, the song’s verses) helps to create a soothing effect. One wonders how many infants have been eased into dreamland by maternal recitals of Blake’s poem.