Clare wrote more than 3,000 lines of poetry and biblical paraphrases in 1841, from the salacious in “Don Juan” to the haunting evocation of loss and home in “Child Harold”. Haunted by a shadow, searching for someone who could never appear, and with the void in his heart growing every day, the isolation within his soul felt like the abyss itself, eating away at his very existence.
So the text of the poem is saturated with thoughts of Mary, as Professor Robinson remarks: “some of his very finest invocations of love for Mary Joyce are to be found in ‘Child Harold” these thoughts run like a scarlet thread through the whole text. He mentions Mary over sixty times in the poem, while his ‘second wife’ Patty Turner is mentioned just five times, and that, all in one early poem.
Throughout the poem Clare’s visions of Mary are often set under over-clouded skies, in shaded bowers or in the twilight. She is slipping in his mind from the real presence of ‘Rose of the World’ to a spectre, an idealised vision of ‘woman’, perhaps summed up by these lines, from the final poem of the Child Harold sequence:
But now loves hopes are all bereft
A lonely man I roam
& abscent Mary long hath left
My heart without a home
Child Harold - Arbour Chapbook No. 20 is of double length - and is available from me at £7.00 + £1.00 towards postage and packing (UK).
Email me on arborfield@pm.me or leave me a message on the John Clare Poet facebook page.
Kindle edition (PDF) is £2.50 - just send me a message.
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