Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  The old pond full of flags and fenced around

  With trees and bushes trailing to the ground

  The water weeds are all around the brink

  And one clear place where cattle go to drink

  From year to year the schoolboy thither steals

  And muddys round the place to catch the eels

  The cowboy often hiding from the flies

  Lies there and plaits the rushcap as he lies

  The hissing owl sits moping all the day

  And hears his song and never flies away

  The pinks nest hangs upon the branch so thin

  The young ones caw and seem as tumbling in

  While round them thrums the purple dragon flye

  And great white butter flye goes dancing bye

  Rarely has the butteriness of a butterfly been so available. The insect has flown into the medium and survives forever there as a pother of lip movement and a set of substituted feet in the scansion of the line. And the old pond here is like the cesspool in ‘The Mouse’s Nest’, in so far as it embodies for Clare not only the reality of all such places as places, with distinct characters and histories, but also their value as a set of memories and affections at the back of his mind. There is dreamwork going on here, as well as photography. The casual rightness and potency of the thing come from a level of engagement well below the visual; in fact, the whole poem acts as a reminder of how integrated and concentrated a poetic response can be. What is unstated can still be felt as a potent charge inside or behind an image or a cadence, and what lies behind the self-possession, the sureness of tone and grip on place in such a poem is Clare’s great feat of endurance in the face of historical and personal crises.

  So far, for example, I have not mentioned Clare’s solidarity with the plight of the rural poor, or taken account of the Enclosure Act that affected Helpston in 1809; I have not commented upon the trauma of the poet’s move from his native village at the age of thirty-nine to the nearby parish of Northborough; I have not enumerated his gradually more frequent depressions, lapses of memory, hallucinations and collapses into delusion when he imagined himself Lord Byron or the prizefighter Jack Randall; I have not dwelt upon the desperate love he felt for his childhood sweetheart Mary Joyce or his intermittent conviction that he was married to her as well as to his wedded wife, Martha Turner; nor have I alluded to his voluntary entry into Dr Allen’s mental hospital in High Beach in Epping Forest in 1837 and his heartbreaking journey of escape out of there four years later in July 1841. But, if I have done none of these things, it is not because I believe that Clare did not suffer fantastically, fiercely and unrelievedly as a result of them, or that they are not fundamental to his sensibility and achievement as a poet.

  On the contrary, the vigour of the poetry is linked to the fact that Clare was harrowed and stricken by personal and historical upheavals all the days of his life, until the two final suspended decades he spent in Northampton Asylum. The poems of these years have understandably been called the ‘poems of John Clare’s madness’ and yet as poems they seem to me less terribly keyed than much that came before them. The torsions and distortions reached a climax in 1841, just before and after his escape from Epping Forest, and during the opening stages of his final commitment on 29 December of that year. These are the months when he wrote his two Byronic pastiches, Child Harold and Don Juan, the latter of which once more deploys in wonky but madly convincing ways Clare’s old gift for mimicry. In his work, he assumes an antic disposition, taunting the reader with a highly aggressive and transgressive intelligence, making sexual and political hay and mayhem. Enigma and affront are precariously balanced, for example, when he turns his attention to his present whereabouts in Essex:

  There’s Doctor Bottle, imp who deals in urine,

  A keeper of state-prisons for the queen

  As great a man as is the Doge of Turin

  And save in London is but seldom seen

  Yclep’d old A-ll-n – mad-brained ladies curing

  Some p-x-d like Flora and but seldom clean

  The new road o’er the forest is the right one

  To see red hell and, further on, the white one

  This is good stuff but it is not quite Clare in his element. The work which simultaneously displays the greatest pressure, the greatest sureness and the greatest nonchalance comes in the main in poems written before Northampton. Obviously, nobody is going to deny the apocalyptic pathos of his most famous asylum poem – the one beginning ‘I am – yet what I am none cares or knows’ and including the line about ‘the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems’; nor is anybody going to undervalue the bonus of indispensable songs and sonnets that belong to this period, especially the very late sonnet ‘To John Clare’ (and not forgetting ‘The Round Oak’, ‘The Yellowhammer’, ‘The Wood Anemonie’, ‘The flag top quivers in the breeze’, ‘The Thunder mutters louder and more loud’, and others). But what crowns the lifetime’s effort is the great outpouring in his early middle years of short verse about solitary figures in a landscape, or outcast figures, or threatened creatures, or lonely creatures, or birds’ nests, or dramatic weather changes, all of which manage to convey uncanny intimations of both vulnerability and staying power. By the very fact of having got themselves written, these poems manifest the efficacy of creative spirit in the face of all the adversity I noticed a moment ago; and they prove once again the truth of Keith Douglas’s notion that the work of art inheres in ‘stating some truth whose eternal quality exacts the same reverence as eternity itself.’

  In this work, Clare is led towards the thing behind his voice and ear which Nadezhda Mandelstam called ‘the nugget of harmony’. To locate this phonetic jewel, to hit upon and hold one’s true note, is a most exacting and intuitive discipline, but it was particularly difficult for a writer like Clare, whose situation in the 1820s was to some extent the same as Christopher Murray Grieve’s a hundred years later; which is to say that Clare, like Grieve, was operating within a received idiom that he half-knew was not the right one for him. Grieve dealt with the problem by inventing synthetic Scots and becoming Hugh MacDiarmid. Perhaps if Clare had changed his name to John Fen or Jack Prog, his wilfulness would have been more clarified and his awareness of what his poetry had to do would have been more pointed. Even so, one might say that MacDiarmid’s theoretical passion in the 1920s fulfilled Clare’s poetic intuition of the 1820s – although Clare’s was always by far the surer voice, artistically speaking. Everything that MacDiarmid wrote about revitalizing the vernacular, all his aspirations to unblock linguistic access to a reservoir of common knowledge and unacknowledged potential, all his angry regret that English literature maintained ‘a narrow ascendancy tradition instead of broad-basing itself on all the diverse cultural elements and splendid variety of languages and dialects, in the British Isles’ – all this was a making explicit of what was implicit in much of Clare’s practice. And I believe that MacDiarmid would also have recognized some affinity between himself and Clare when it came to the use of the ballad measure.

  This was the one poetic beat that had sounded in the ears of both poets from the beginning, the measure in which personal and communal experience could enter each other as indissolubly as two streams, and it was the measure in which Clare’s moral outrage got expressed most pungently. When, for example, in one of his most powerful poems, the quarry field known as Swordy Well begins to speak, we recognize immediately that Clare’s voice is in a deep old groove and that he is hauling into vivid speech an awareness of injustice for which he has paid a personal price; yet it is also an awareness sanctioned by the bleak folk wisdom of the ballad tradition and by the high tragic understanding of life shared by the authors of King Lear and The Book of Job.

  The 1809 Act of Parliament for the Enclosure of Helpston had granted Swordy Well to the overseers of the roads in the parish. The field had thereby lost its independence and become like a pauper, dependent upon parish charity. In Clare’s poem, what opens the channels
of expression so exhilaratingly is the removal of every screen between the identity of the person and the identity of the place. ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ is by no means as extraordinary an achievement as MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, but it still represents a thrilling integration of common idiom and visionary anger of the sort that MacDiarmid longed to reintroduce in Scotland. However, the main point I want to make about it is that the ballad stanza does for Clare what it would do for MacDiarmid; it places him at the centre of his world and keeps his voice on course like a plough in a furrow. Here are a few selected stanzas, where the assailed dignity of the pauper and the fate of the requisitioned ground are mutually expressive of each other’s plight:

  I hold no hat to beg a mite

  Nor pick it up when thrown

  Nor limping leg I hold in sight

  But pray to keep my own

  Where profit gets his clutches in

  Theres little he will leave

  Gain stooping for a single pin

  Will stick it on his sleeve …

  Alas dependance thou’rt a brute

  Want only understands

  His feelings wither branch and root

  That falls in parish hands

  The muck that clouts the ploughman’s shoe

  The moss that hides the stone

  Now Im become the parish due

  Is more than I can own …

  The silver springs grown naked dykes

  Scarce own a bunch of rushes

  When grain got high the tasteless tykes

  Grubbed up trees banks, and bushes

  And me they turned me inside out

  For sand and grit and stones

  And turned my old green hill about

  And pickt my very bones

  These things that claim my own as theirs

  Were born but yesterday

  But ere I fell to town affairs

  I were as proud as they

  I kept my horses cows and sheep

  And built the town below

  Ere they had cat or dog to keep

  And then to use me so …

  The bees flye round in feeble rings

  And find no blossom bye

  Then thrum their almost weary winds

  Upon the moss and die

  Rabbits that find my hills turned o’er

  Forsake my poor abode

  They dread a workhouse like the poor

  And nibble on the road …

  Ive scare a nook to call my own

  For things that creep or flye

  The beetle hiding neath a stone

  Does well to hurry bye

  Stock ats my struggles every day

  As bare as any road

  He’s sure to be in somethings way

  If eer he stirs abroad …

  The point of this poem, of course, and of another similar if gentler exercise in dramatic monologue called ‘The Lamentations of Round Oak Water’, is to make a point. Their social protest and their artistic effort are in perfect step. And if there is an emphatic thump to the metre, this is inherent in the convention: the broad effect comes with the genre. What I want to emphasize is that the ballad stanza kept Clare on the right road poetically by giving him a traditional tune to march to, if not exactly complete access to his own ‘nugget of harmony’.

  That nugget is something more elusive and more individual to a poet than anything comprised by a metre. In Clare’s case, it is to be found mostly in the poems that we might call his short takes. These are quick little forays of surprising innocence and accuracy, poems where subjects such as the ones I mentioned earlier – creatures, country scenes and so on – pass in and out of language every bit as fluently as moods and impulses pass between the body and the weather itself. In these poems the nugget of harmony is not present as a virtuosity; the trueness of these ‘supplets’ has less to do with composed sweetness and nice modulation and deliberate technique than with a spontaneous at-homeness in speech itself. In fact, there is not a great deal of variety in the tunes of the poems, just as there never is any great variety of pitch in the cries that people let out at moments of spontaneous excitement – and the work I’m thinking of can be understood to constitute a succession of just such brief, intense, spontaneous outcries.

  The poems about birds’ nests belong to this category, especially ones like ‘The Wryneck’s Nest’ and ‘The Fern Owl’s Nest’. Well-known snap-shot work such as ‘Hares at Play’ belong to it also; and little genre paintings like the sonnet on ‘The Woodman’; and landscape poems such as ‘Emmonsdale Heath’; and, in a deeper register, the short sonnet sequence about ‘The Badger’ and the sonnet-diptych about ‘The Marten-Cat’ and ‘The Fox’. The desire to quote all of these is strong but the time is short and the texts are widely available. Here instead is an incidental example of the kind of excellence I have in mind, a fragment of sorts, just a stray stanza really, and yet its random swoop upon the momentary – its casually perfect close-ups on raindrops, for example – illustrates all over again the fact that the truth of art does lie in those minor points of major importance:

  The thunder mutters louder and more loud

  With quicker motion hay folks ply the rake

  Ready to bust slow sails the pitch black cloud

  And all the gang a bigger haycock make

  To sit beneath – the woodland winds awake

  The drops so large wet all thro’ in an hour

  A tiney flood runs down the leaning rake

  In the sweet hay yet dry the hay folks cower

  And some beneath the waggon shun the shower

  It’s populous, it’s unpretentious, it seems effortless, yet it is actually a triumph of compression that manages to combine the shapeliness of nine end-stopped, closed-off lines in rhyme with the totally active movements of clouds and haymakers and raindrops and waterlogged wind. In fact, the movements of the world are here an aspect of the movements of Clare’s own vivid spirit; and the lines both illustrate and obey the Wordsworthian imperative that poetry should disclose in the workings of the universe analogues for the working of the human mind and soul. Just because Clare’s poetry abounds in actualities, just because it is as full of precise delightful detail as a granary is full of grains, does not mean that it is doomed to pile up and sink down in its own materiality. On the contrary, that which is special and unique about it is its lambency, its skim-factor, its bobbing unencumbered motion. It is what Lawrence calls the poetry of the living present; and its persistent theme, under many guises, in different subjects and scenes and crises, is the awful necessity of the gift for keeping going and the lovely wonder that it can be maintained – a gift which is tutored by the instinctive cheer and courage of living creatures, and heartened by every fresh turn and return of things in the natural world. Clare is always cheering for the victim, always ready to pitch in on the side of whatever is tender and well disposed, or whatever is courageous and outnumbered – like the badger:

  He turns about to face the loud uproar

  And drives the rebels to their very doors

  The frequent stone is hurled where eer they go

  When badgers fight and every ones a foe

  The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray

  The badger turns and drives them all away

  Though scarcly half as big, dimute and small,

  He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all

  The heavy mastiff savage in the fray

  Lies down and licks his feet and turns away

  The bull-dog knows his match and waxes cold

  The badger grins and never leaves his hold

  He drives the crowd and follows at their heels

  And bites them through. The drunkard swears and reels

  Needless to say, in spite of my praise for these vivid shorter poems, I do not wish to underrate performances by Clare of greater rhetorical sweep and more sustained intellectual purpose. His ode ‘To the Snipe’, for instance, is someth
ing of a set-piece and exhibits the customary fit between word and thing – the quagmire overgrown ‘with hassock tufts of sedge’, and the moor with its ‘spungy lap’ – but what makes it a poem of classical force is the perfect posture it maintains as it moves energetically through the demands of a strict and complex stanza-form. There’s something almost Marvellian about its despatch and articulation. Just because I set such store by Clare, the astonished admirer, doesn’t mean I don’t esteem the more deliberately ambitious poet of lines like these:

  Lover of swamps

  The quagmire overgrown

  With hassock tufts of sedge – where fear encamps

  Around thy home alone

  The trembling grass

  Quakes from the human foot

  Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass

  Where he alone and mute

  Sitteth at rest

  In safety neath the clump

  Of huge flag-forrest that thy haunts invest

  Or some old sallow stump …

  For here thy bill

  Suited by wisdom good

  Of rude unseemly length doth delve and drill

  The gelid mass for food

  ‘To the Snipe’ is one kind of excellence, and there are others. Nobody would want to slight the balmier, plashier riches of a poem like ‘The Summer Shower’, or the set-pieces in The Shepherd’s Calendar, or those other much praised and thematically central poems of the Northborough period like ‘The Flitting’ and ‘Remembrances’. But it’s possible to acknowledge the different orders of excellence which these poems represent and still choose to prize most in Clare’s œuvre that attribute which Tom Paulin characterized in another context as ‘the now of utterance’.