The Wish (Ch.26)

Into a generation of poets who simply toyed with nature poetry, unexpectedly a true nature-poet whose exhaustive knowledge of English flora and fauna, observed in minute detail, appears like the scent of a mown hayfield.  Who else but Clare could have written ‘The Primrose’:

 

Welcome pale primrose starting up between
Dead matted leaves of ash & oak that strew
The every lawn the wood & spinney through
Mid creeping moss & Ivys darker green

 

In his introduction to ‘Early Poems of John Clare’ Professor Eric Robinson writes:

 

“It is a miracle that John Clare ever became a poet.  Everything was against him: and illiterate mother and barely literate father, agricultural poverty in a small village on the fringes of Northamptonshire, a strictly hierarchical society made more rigid by the tyranny of parish officials, and schooling limited to a dame-school and a nearby parish classroom, an education sporadic and incomplete.”

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