A visit to a poet's grave

I'd put it off for too long. After reading Jonathan Bate's excellent biography of the poet John Clare, I had determined to go to Helpston and see for myself the final resting place of the man they had called the 'Peasant Poet'. One fine spring day, I finally made it.

'A Poet Is Born Not Made' is the inscription on one side of Clare's distinctive gravestone. Sadly for John, when he was born the world was already turning into a place so unsuited to his talents and temperament that it eventually drove him into the confines of a lunatic asylum for most of his adult life.

John Clare was born in 1793 in Helpston (then 'Helpstone') in the county of Northamptonshire. The borders of the shires have altered since that time and the village now nestles just inside Cambridgeshire, a few miles from Stamford. He was born into poverty but lived a happy childhood life with his parents and siblings. His love for nature compelled him to write about it almost obsessively, and eventually his poems were discovered and promoted by an influential Stamford publisher with contacts in London. Clare became famous almost overnight, rather in the way that his great idol Lord Byron had a few years before.

Clare met and mixed briefly with the literary lions of London. But he remained a country lad at heart, and his loyalties and responsibilities to his roots held him back when others might have gone forward. Never a man of robust health, the conflicts and tensions of his situation virtually broke him. Instead of a happy and successful life, John Clare found only physical hardship and mental anguish.

When Clare died in 1864, a thoughtful patron saved the poet from being buried in a pauper's grave in Northampton Asylum. The body was brought back to Helpston, where it was buried in the village churchyard alongside the grave of his parents. The suffering was over.

John Clare and his work is now being appreciated more than at any time in the past. The proprietor of the public house next to the church told me that tourists from all over the world, including Japan, come into his establishment and ask about this ill-fated but much admired genius.

I decided to take lunch in that most hospitable and unpretentious of pubs. The landlord led me into the long room which was now the dining area but was once the very room where John's coffin was laid out on the night previous to his burial. A more restful and peaceful atmosphere I could not have wished to come across. As I visited the church a little while later and read the inscriptions both on Clare's grave and that of his parents, it became clear to me that at least the poet had had one stroke of good fortune, albeit at the end of his life. He had come back home.

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 oblivion's host

(John Clare, LINES: "I AM")

Statue of an enigma

In the Castle Gardens, Leicester, stands a wonderful statue of Richard III. The commission was carried out by James Butler, RA, and was erected in 1980. Repeatedly vandalised in the early days, it was transferred from its initial site to a less exposed part of the Gardens. This turned out to be an inspired move, for the interference ceased. From the new location, only yards away from Bow Bridge, it now directly overlooks the very route on which Richard led out his army westwards from the city on the morning of August 21, 1485, to locate and do battle the following day with the usurping forces of Henry Tudor.

This striking piece of work encapsulates so much of the drama and desperation associated with Richard III. It depicts the king on the verge of defeat, his clothes torn from his unprotected arms as he stands with his dagger gripped in one hand and his battle crown raised in the other. The face, a picture of searing anguish, searches to the heavens in this final moment of regal defiance.

There is no hint of deformity in this sculpture. Nor is there any evidence of Shakespeare's 'bottled spider'; no 'ugly and unnatural aspect' to furnish it. Those who wish to see such time-honoured peculiarities must look elsewhere. Here is the portrayal of a man with strong, regular features; here stands the warrior king, courageous to the last in his spirited defence of the realm. It might be argued this is how Richard himself would have hoped to have been remembered by the world at large. We know, these many years after his brutal death at Bosworth Field, that such a hope has not been fulfilled.

Shakespeare's play, Richard III, is the riveting masterpiece that brought the poet popular acclaim. Alas for Richard, it almost certainly cast its subject into eternal damnation. Posterity had been served up the epitomical arch-villain and it wasn't going to let it go. The great actors of succeeding generations faithfully rallied to the Shakespearean cause, right through to the 20th century when Laurence Olivier's stupefying interpretation gave the world the definitive article.

It is faintly ironic - some would say fitting - that the Leicester statue not only oversees Richard's path out of the city to battle, but also his awful and ignominious return in death and defeat. Perhaps in the irony we can see a kind of balance of the noble and ignoble aspects of this enigma. Perhaps, if we look hard enough at the statue and have the inclination on the day, we might even sense something of the heart-rending nature of the human condition.

Pic: (c) P Taylor