The Life of John Clare | Page 3

travels
through many countries. And now the old, old story, as ancient as the
hills, was played over again once more. It was no very difficult task for
the clever tramp to win the heart of the poor village girl; and the rest
followed as may be imagined. When spring and summer was gone, and
the cold wind came blowing over the fen, the poor little thing told her
lover that she was in the way of becoming a mother, and, with tears in
her eyes, entreated him to make her his wife. He promised to do so, the
tramping schoolmaster; but early the next day he left the village, never
to return. Then there was bitter lamentation in the cottage of the
parish-clerk; and before the winter was gone, the poor man's daughter
brought into the world a little boy, whom she gave her own family
name, together with the prefixed one of the unworthy father. Such was
the origin of Parker Clare.
What sort of existence this poor son of a poor mother went through, is
easily told. Education he had none; of joys of childhood he knew
nothing; even his daily allowance of coarse food was insufficient. He
thus grew up, weak and in ill-health; but with a cheerful spirit
nevertheless. Parker Clare knew more songs than any boy in the village,
and his stock of ghost stories and fairy tales was quite inexhaustible.
When grown into manhood, and yet not feeling sufficiently strong for
the harder labours of the field, he took service as a shepherd, and was
employed by his masters to tend their flocks in the neighbourhood,

chiefly in the plains north of the village, known as Helpston Heath. In
this way, he became acquainted with the herdsman of the adjoining
township of Castor, a man named John Stimson, whose cattle was
grazing right over the walls of ancient Durobrivae. John Stimson's
place was taken, now and then, by his daughter Ann--an occurrence not
unwelcome to Parker Clare; and while the sheep were grazing on the
borders of Helpo's Heath, and the cattle seeking for sorrel and clover
over the graves of Trajan's warriors, the young shepherd and
shepherdess talked sweet things to each other, careless of flocks and
herds, of English knights and Roman emperors. So it came that one
morning Ann told her father that she had promised to marry Parker
Clare. Old John Stimson thought it a bad match: 'when poverty comes
in at the door, love flies out of the window,' he said, fortified by the
wisdom of two score ten. But when was ever such wisdom listened to
at eighteen!
The girl resolved to marry her lover with or without leave; and as for
Parker Clare, he needed no permission, his mother, dependent for years
upon the cold charity of the workhouse, having long ceased to control
his doings. Thus it followed that in the autumn of 1792, when
Robespierre was ruling France, and William Pitt England, young
Parker Clare was married to Ann Stimson of Castor. Seven months
after, on the 13th day of July, 1793, Parker Clare's wife was delivered,
prematurely, of twins, a boy and a girl. The girl was healthy and strong;
but the boy looked weak and sickly in the extreme. It seemed not
possible that the boy could live, therefore the mother had him baptized
immediately, calling him John, after her father. However, human
expectations were not verified in the twin children; the strong girl died
in early infancy, while the sickly boy lived--lived to be a poet.
Of Poeta nascitur non fit there never was a truer instance than in the
case of John Clare. Impossible to imagine circumstances and scenes
apparently more adverse to poetic inspiration than those amidst which
John Clare was placed at his birth. His parents were the poorest of the
poor; their whole aim of life being engrossed by the one all-absorbing
desire to gain food for their daily sustenance. They lived in a narrow
wretched hut, low and dark, more like a prison than a human dwelling;
and the hut stood in a dark, gloomy plain, covered with stagnant pools
of water, and overhung by mists during the greater part of the year. Yet

from out these surroundings sprang a being to whom all life was golden,
and all nature a breath of paradise. John Clare was a poet almost as
soon as he awoke to consciousness. His young mind marvelled at all
the wonderful things visible in the wide world: the misty sky, the green
trees, the fish in the water, and the birds in the air. In all the things
around him the boy saw nothing but endless, glorious beauty; his whole
mind was filled with a deep sense of the infinite marvels of the living