romantics

Autumn Birds The wild duck startles like a sudden thought, And heron slow as if it might be caught. The flopping crows on weary wings go by And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly. The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by, And darken like a clod the evening sky. The larks like thunder rise and suthy round, Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground. The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud With white neck peering to the evening cloud. The weary rooks to distant woods are gone. With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow While small birds nestle in the edge below.

Dear Sir I am in a Madhouse and quite forget your Name or who you are – you must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I don’t know – I have nothing to say so I conclude Yours respectfully, John Clare

Summer Evening The frog half fearful jumps across the path, And little mouse that leaves its hole at eve Nimbles with timid dread beneath the swath; My rustling steps awhile their joys deceive, Till past,—and then the cricket sings more strong, And grasshoppers in merry moods still wear The short night weary with their fretting song. Up from behind the molehill jumps the hare, Cheat of his chosen bed, and from the bank The yellowhammer flutters in short fears From off its nest hid in the grasses rank, And drops again when no more noise it hears. Thus nature's human link and endless thrall, Proud man, still seems the enemy of all.

  And yet there is another Clare—no, several other Clares—to be found in his more than three thousand completed poems. Given how often Michael Dickman’s own poetry has portrayed unstable mental states, you might expect him to gravitate toward Clare’s madness. In fact, the Clare of “John Clare,” appearing in Dickman’s   Green Migraine  (2015), is an altogether friendlier figure: an avatar of childhood closeness to nature, a man who saw nature as something we live among (not something we travel to visit), a paragon of enlightened simplicity, and a devotee of local or dialect words. As such—this being Dickman’s poem—Clare resembles the kids in “7-Eleven parking lots / skateboarding through / black fields.” Adulthood itself is for Dickman a kind of enclosure: “Children play in the past / in pastures . . . Cows move through the fields to the fence and won’t move again.” Dickman’s raw short lines, incapable of hypotaxis, speak to Clare’s sometimes-obsessive attention to the imm...

Insects These tiny loiterers on the barley’s beard, And happy units of a numerous herd Of playfellows, the laughing Summer brings, Mocking the sunshine on their glittering wings, How merrily they creep, and run, and fly! No kin they bear to labour’s drudgery, Smoothing the velvet of the pale hedge-rose; And where they fly for dinner no one knows – The dew-drops feed them not – they love the shine Of noon, whose suns may bring them golden wine All day they’re playing in their Sunday dress – When night reposes, for they can do no less; Then, to the heath-bell’s purple hood they fly, And like to princes in their slumbers lie, Secure from rain, and dropping dews, and all, In silken beds and roomy painted hall. So merrily they spend their summer-day, Now in the corn-fields, now in the new-mown hay. One almost fancies that such happy things, With coloured hoods and richly burnished wings, Are fairy folk, in splendid masquerade Disguised, as if of mortal folk afraid, Keeping their joyous pran...

The Vixen Among the taller wood with ivy hung, The old fox plays and dances round her  young . She snuffs and barks if any passes by And swings her tail and turns prepared to fly. The horseman hurries by, she bolts to see, And turns agen, from  danger   never  free. If any stands she runs among the poles And barks and snaps and drive them in the holes. The shepherd sees them and the boy goes by And gets a stick and progs the hole to try. They get all still and lie in safety sure, And out again when everything's  secure , And  start  and snap at blackbirds bouncing by To  fight  and catch the  great   white   butterfly .

  s Clock-O'-Clay In the cowslip pips I lie,  Hidden from the buzzing fly,  While green grass beneath me lies,  Pearled with dew like fishes' eyes,  Here I lie, a clock-o'-clay,  Waiting for the time o' day.  While the forest quakes surprise,  And the wild wind sobs and sighs,  My home rocks as like to fall,  On its pillar green and tall;  When the pattering rain drives by  Clock-o'-clay keeps warm and dry.  Day by day and night by night,  All the week I hide from sight;  In the cowslip pips I lie,  In the rain still warm and dry;  Day and night and night and day,  Red, black-spotted clock-o'-clay.  My home shakes in wind and showers,  Pale green pillar topped with flowers,  Bending at the wild wind's breath,  Till I touch the grass beneath;  Here I live, lone clock-o'-clay,  Watching for the time of day.

  I AM I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,   My friends forsake me like a memory lost;  I am the self-consumer of my woes,  They rise and vanish in oblivious host,  Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;  And yet I am! and live with shadows tost  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,  Into the living sea of waking dreams,  Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,  But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;  And e'en the dearest- that I loved the best-  Are strange- nay, rather stranger than the rest.  I long for scenes where man has never trod;  A place where woman never smil'd or wept;  There to abide with my creator, God,  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:  Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;  The grass below- above the vaulted sky.

Autumn Birds The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,   And heron slow as if it might be caught.  The flopping crows on weary wings go by  And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly.  The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by,  And darken like a clod the evening sky.  The larks like thunder rise and suthy round,  Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground.  The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud  With white neck peering to the evening clowd.  The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.  With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on  To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow  While small birds nestle in the edge below.

excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798                                               These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary we...

Composed upon Westminster Bridge,  September 3, 1802 Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent , bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky, All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did the sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep! T he river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

  "Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant" Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air Of absence withers what was once so fair? Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant? Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant— Bound to thy service with unceasing care, The mind’s least generous wish a mendicant For nought but what thy happiness could spare. Speak— though this soft warm heart, once free to hold A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine, Be left more desolate, more dreary cold Than a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow ‘Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine— Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.

"Great men have been among us..." Great men have been among us; hands that penned And tongues that uttered wisdom--better none: The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington, Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend. These moralists could act and comprehend: They knew how genuine glory was put on; Taught us how rightfully nation shone In splendour: what strength was, that would not bend But in magnanimous meekness. France, 'tis strange, Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then. Perpetual emptiness! unceasing change! No single volume paramount, no code, No master spirit, no determined road; But equally a want of books and men!

                 To Southey  Southey ! thy melodies steal o'er mine ear     Like far-off joyance, or the murmering     Of wild bees in the sunny showers of Spring— Sounds of such mingled import as may cheer The lonely breast, yet rouse a mindful tear:     Wak'd by the Song doth Hope-born  Fancy  fling     Rich showers of dewy fragrance from her wing, Till sickly  Passion's  drooping Myrtles sear Blossom anew! But O! more thrill'd, I prize     Thy sadder strains, that bid in  Memory's  Dream  The faded forms of past Delight arise;     Then soft, on Love's pale cheek, the tearful gleam Of Pleasures smiles—as, faint, yet beauteous lies The imag'd Rainbow on a willowy stream. [7]

Effusion VIII O  WHAT a loud and fearful shriek [1]  was there, As tho' a thousand souls one death-groan pour'd! Ah me! they view'd beneath an hireling's sword Fall'n  KOSKIUSKO ! Thro' the burthen'd air (As pauses the tir'd Cossac's barb'rous yell Of Triumph) on the chill and midnight gale Rises with frantic burst or sadder swell The dirge of murder'd Hope! while Freedom pale Bends in  such  anguish o'er her destin'd bier, As if from eldest time some Spirit meek Had gather'd in a mystic urn each tear That ever furrow'd a sad Patriot's cheek; And she had drain'd the sorrows of the bowl Ev'n till she reel'd, intoxicate of soul!

  Frost at Midnight The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought.      ...

  This Lime-tree Bower my Prison [Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London] Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile, Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash, Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone.    ...