John FelstinerA Selection from So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency
These two essays come from the manuscript of So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency, a field guide or handbook for the common reader. Five more essays drawn from the 43 in this book--on Dickinson, Millay, Swenson, Haines, and again Williams--will appear in successive issues of APR during 2007. Since the title and much stimulus for my book stem from William Carlos Williams, we begin with him, along with the least known of the Romantics, who told his children, "I usd to drop down under a bush & scribble the fresh thoughts on the crown of my hat as I found nature then." My aim throughout this series is to face a crying need of our time by bringing alive the environmental imprint and impetus in familiar and surprising poems."broken / seedhusks"
Reviving America with William Carlos Williams
"Things would really grow for him," Flossie said about her husband of fifty years, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). And he remembered "once when the boys were small taking them in along an old wood road in our boots from Paterson Avenue among the trees to dig up a wild azalea. I found a bush and carried it out, the roots and a good hunk of wet sod resting, in a burlap bag, across my shoulders."
As against Robert Frost, Williams came to style himself an urban pastoral poet, a local of Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. During his boyhood and on through World War II, though, Rutherford was more rural than urban, a small town surrounded by field, farm, marsh, and woodland. "Imagine!" he says of his early years, "No sewers, no water supply, no gas, even. Certainly no electricity; no telephone, not even a trolley car. The sidewalks were of wood ... cesspools in the back yard and outhouses.... Our drinking water was rain water collected from the roof." Willie got a dime an hour for pumping water down from a wooden tank in the attic.
His earliest "thronging memories" make up a genesis of the poet to come. From his first year: "Pop was chopping down a small tree. Each time he'd swing the axe and I heard it wham into the wood, I'd let out a wild cackle of delight." He recalls his uncle shooting a squirrel that fell "bloody, at our feet" from a pine tree, a red snake beheaded, and unforgettably, a cow running wild that they chased "over the fence, the milk flying out behind her in our faces." That sensation alone could rouse a budding poet.
"Kipp's woods, just over the back fence, was our wilderness"--"my magic forest," says Williams. "I knew every tree in that wood, from the hickory where a squirrel had its hole to the last dogwood where in the fall the robins would gather for the red berries they are so fond of." Alert to the action and names of things, "What I learned was the way the moss climbed about a tree's roots, what growing dogwood and iron wood looked like; the way rotten leaves will mat down in a hole--and their smell when turned over--every patch among those trees had its character, moist or dry."
He collected insects and butterflies, "but flowers and trees were my peculiar interest. To touch a tree, to climb it especially, but just to know the flowers was all I wanted." Williams would go on to compose 200 flower poems. "The slender neck of the anemone particularly haunts me for some reason and the various sorts of violets--the tall blue ones, those with furry stems and the large, scarce, branching yellow ones, stars of Bethlehem, spring beauties, wild geranium, hepaticas with three-lobed leaves." Sent to school in Switzerland, fifty years later he recalls how the "green-flowered asphodel made a tremendous impression on me."
Of course hindsight is not transparent but filtered, sifted. Early impressions that end up as memories first took root subliminally and then persisted for good cause. The striking moments Williams recollects had all along been shaping his sense of himself, only later to confirm it. "There is a long history in each of us that comes as not only a reawakening but a repossession when confronted by this world." Here a child's response to kaleidoscopic nature feeds into a poet's designs on "this world." "The tassels of the chestnut--young and old trees, beggar's lice, spiders, shining insects--all these things were as much part of my expanding existence as breathing. I was comforted by them. It was an unconscious triumph all day long just to be able to get out of doors and into my personal wild world." That thought could be John Clare's.
The child's "personal wild world" underwrites the poet's signature moments, such as "cheeping birds" resting and feeding on "harsh weedstalks" in "To Waken an Old Lady." Williams's "expanding existence" in childhood would lead to "the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf" in "Spring and All," where "It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf," and plantlives enter the world: "rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken." Simply the crisped energy in that "stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf," new growth taking form, has bred a whole strain of possibility in modern poetry.
Born to a half-Sephardic Puerto Rican mother and an English father from Santo Domingo, Williams came by poetical leanings on his own, and knew from the outset he'd need gainful employment. High school thoughts of an athletic career shattered when he collapsed after a hard race, yet his despondency provoked a poem:A black, black cloud
flew over the sun
driven by fierce flying
rain.Though he realized rain doesn't drive clouds, this instinctual beginning gave Williams joy, crystallized his calling.
For a livelihood he took up medicine, working over forty years as an expert and beloved general practitioner, tending to all sorts and conditions in Rutherford homes and schools and in Passaic Hospital, delivering thousands of babies, leading community organizations. During the influenza epidemic of 1918 he made sixty house calls a day. Amidst all this, over the years, he scrounged time to write--in his office between patients and at home late at night: poetry collections, novels, stories, translations, essays, plays, reviews, autobiography, and always letters. He told a friend: "My family is prostrated--my patients are dying--I have not kissed my mother for three weeks." Zealous to regenerate American poetry, he contributed to many magazines and started several.
"Make it new!," his comrade Ezra Pound declared, and Williams never tired of that theme.
"Waken! my people, to the boughs green
With ripening fruit within you!
Waken to the myriad cinquefoil
In the waving grass of your minds!
Waken to the silent phoebe nest
Under the eaves of your spirit!"he cries in "The Wanderer" (1914), intoxicated with everything "so new now / To my marveling eyes." This young wanderer merges with "The Passaic, that filthy river" bearing him beneath its mud and stench "Into the crystal beginning of its days." A little later, T.S. Eliot would seek renewal in The Waste Land by setting off London's fouled river with a mellifluous verse from Spenser, "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song." The difference is that American-born Eliot turned back to Europe and a classic source, whereas Williams stayed local, in Walt Whitman's footsteps.
"To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet," The Waste Land, "the great catastrophe to our letters." Williams felt "we were on the point of ... a new art form itself--rooted in the locality which should give it fruit," when Eliot expatriated. Though he himself had fed on Keats's rich verbal music along with Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Williams had his own driving agenda: to deal in American material and idiom with homegrown rather than inherited verse forms.
Emily Dickinson--"Emily was my patron saint"--had "succeeded by hammering her form obstinately into some kind of homespun irregularity," such as her "unrhymes." She "followed the American idiom." As for the bard who claimed "I hear America singing, her varied carols," Williams thanked Whitman for breaking from European models--rhyme, stanza, pentameter--toward freer rhythms, and for taking in the ocean's "slow-measured sweep" at Brooklyn's Coney Island. "The greatest moment in the history / of the American poem was when / Walt Whitman stood looking to sea / from the shelving sands." But Whitman, whose free verse could turn flaccid and garrulous, "to me is one broom stroke and that is all." The same letter dismissed Robert Frost's "bucolic simplicity"--which is itself a gross simplification. Not that Frost, who twice snubbed Williams in Vermont, wasn't also vying for the inside lane in American poetry.
When The Waste Land came out in 1922, giving poetry "back to the academics" (he thought) and sowing disillusion, Williams had already created his own brand of writing. Al Que Quiere, he titled an early book, "To whoever wants it," thinking of a soccer pass. Like Whitman and unlike Eliot, he caught the ordinary grace of people, the young housewife "tucking in / stray ends of hair." And of flowers too. In "Blueflags" he takes his children to "where the streets end / in the sun / at the marsh edge," and among reeds they pluck fistfuls of wild iris
till in the air
there comes the smell
of calamus
from wet, gummy stalks.--calamus, whose bladelike leaves had meant natural sexuality for Whitman. More and more flowers show up in Williams's verse, with the common vernacular names he cherished: star-of-Bethlehem, spring beauty, Indian tobacco, heal-all, boneset. He wrote poems called "Primrose," "Queen-Ann's-Lace," "Great Mullen," and "Daisy":
The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha!whose "crisp petals remain / brief, translucent, greenfastened, / barely touching at the edges."
That fresh eye animates a 1920 wake-up call for American verse that even Williams's detractors love. It salutes his mother, then 73:
To Waken an Old LadyOld age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind--
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty.Eighteen lines and at the fulcrum a startle--"But what?"
We enter a process of discovery: "Old age is / ..." What we can't yet know is that this one-line, definition-like beginning will be the last we hear of old age. From then on a landscape unscrolls of birds, trees, snow, wind, weeds, seeds, and shrill piping. Like a baking recipe--TO RAISE A SOUFFLÉ--or a medical procedure, "To Waken an Old Lady" notes each step, each line leaves us groping, eager for the next --"But what?" Like a catch breath in singing, each line break at once pauses and proceeds, stays and goes.
Something happens here, enacting not recalling: ear and eye switchback down the page through an event. Hating what's hackneyed, refusing elaboration, the poem doesn't COPY reality (Williams liked thumping capitals) but IMITATES, becomes imagination's new reality, the only kind we can grasp inside ourselves. He jostles us into seeing and hearing with fresh immediacy by jagging his line endings, playing his own pauses off against habitual speech. "Old age is" should right away tell us what it is--but we're stopped by a break. Verbs usually fasten onto objects--but the birds are held for a moment, "skimming / bare trees."
So far, things seem bleak: small, skimming, bare, failing, buffeted, dark. Then midway through, suddenly "But what?" occurs in a brief time-lapse between present ("they are buffeted") and past ("the flock has rested"). Now "the snow / is covered with broken / "--"But what?" Seedhusks! Because in one moment the flock has deftly stripped those husks and fed on seeds. Bare Anglo-Saxon (not Latinate) syllables, "weedstalks" and "seedhusks," sound dry but tally rhythmically and nearly rhyme, as "seedhusks" save the day in a tongue-crisping, one-word line of their own. Nature plays out her vicissitudes: wind, yes, but tempered; tempered, but shrill; shrill, then "piping of plenty"--echoing the falling cadence of "gaining and failing," offering relief.
By the end (though it's more like a new beginning) we've all but forgotten the brief, bluff statement that started these lines. Medically speaking, Dr. Williams's "Old age is" yields a bizarre definition, with cheeping and skimming, weedstalks and seedhusks. His exercise in metaphor jumps straight from old age to nature--a feat of imagination. Usually figures of speech go back and touch base with what they're figures for. Take Shakespeare:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end."To Waken an Old Lady" finesses old age and instead immerses in an ecologic drama of small birds surviving harsh weather. Immersing in nature's doings turns out to be the real prescription, after all! His mother lived to 102.
Springtime in the northeast is welcome but slow in coming, since "April is the cruelest month," Eliot says, "stirring dull roots with spring rain." Echoing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dante, Milton, Spenser, et al., Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) spurred Williams to compose an American antidote, Spring and All (1923), part prose manifesto and part poem sequence. "There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world," so Williams urges us to "imagine the New World that rises to our windows" every day.
Where The Waste Land intones "dead land ... dull roots ... dried tubers ... dead tree," Williams's title poem "Spring and All" relocates that landscape just where, as a physician, he often found himself:By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast--a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallenpatches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines--Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches--They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leafBut now the stark dignity of
entrance--Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awakenAs he was about to present this poem, at Harvard in 1951, Williams stopped and joshed his academic audience: "Now you notice what I said: there is no subject that the modern poem cannot approach, there is no selected material. It's what you do with a work of art, it's what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the picture. It's how the words fit in--poems are not made of thought, beautiful thoughts, it's made of words! pigment! put on! here! there! made! actually!" Williams himself loved painting, like Hopkins, Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott. His "Spring and All" reads like a kinetic landscape-in-words.
"In the composition," he says, "the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life." Sketching in his canvas--"By the road ... under the surge.... All along the road ... under them"--Williams adds daubs of shape, color, texture, and even smell, rank "muddy fields" and "standing water." Under wind-driven clouds the land appears inert, poor "stuff," yet bristling with the ways adjectives can take form: "purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy." Most telling of all: among staggered, jagged phrasings for fifteen lines, no main verb ties down the mind's eye until "leafless" modulates to "Lifeless" and midway through the time of this poem, "sluggish / dazed spring approaches--"
"They enter the new world naked," so raw we can't tell whether "They" are plantlife or newborn infants. A translation by Octavio Paz reads Entran en el mundo desnudos, "They enter the world naked." Was Mexico's thoughtful spokespoet, on behalf of the continent's indigenous peoples, doubting this "new world"? Williams had another priority: "at last SPRING is approaching" after our dead-time spent copying the European past, he says in Spring and All. "THE WORLD IS NEW."
"Spring and All," the poem itself, makes organic uprising ring like a political manifesto:
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leafWe've seen that stiff curl of Queen Anne's Lace in the ground or the flower shop, but have we said it so as to see it afresh? What grips the mind's eye is a tension between "curl" and "stiff" (he added that adjective later), a charged energy caught in momentary stillness, growth taking shape, plus the compression of "wildcarrot" in one word. "One by one objects are defined," says the poet, getting a double sense from "defined": identified essentially, and outlined with crisp new edges by nature and the poet both.
The 68-year-old speaking this younger-man's lyric still bubbles with excitement. After the poem's fifth alerting dash we hear "-- / It quickens," a neuter pronoun that fuses poetry's with nature's work of quickening, fuses speech with reality. Life around us quickens in warming up, in pulsing more rapidly; the core or "quick" of things wakens from death to life, as in "the quick and the dead"; new life stirs, the fetus "quickening."
Even at the end, through expectant line breaks, momentum gathers with each verb: "profound change / has come upon them ... they / grip down." Answering Eliot's feverish "What are the roots that clutch," "Spring and All" ends with nature's renewable energy reaching deep into local ground: "rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken."
"Its only bondage was the circling sky"
John Clare at Home in Helpston
I grew so much into the quiet love of nature's preserves that I was never easy but when I was in the fields passing my sabbaths and leisure with the shepherds & herdboys as fancys prompted sometimes playing at marbles on the smooth-beaten sheeptracks or leapfrog among the thymy molehills sometimes running among the corn to get the red & blue flowers for cockades to play at soldiers or running into the woods to hunt strawberries or stealing peas in churchtime when the owners were safe to boil at the gypseys fire who went half-shares at our stolen luxury we heard the bells chime but the field was our churchRunning everywhere here, John Clare (1793-1864) tells his children about his own childhood in the village of Helpston and East Anglia's fen country. "In a strange stillness watching for hours the little insects climb up & down the tall stems of the wood grass," this son of an agricultural laborer and an illiterate mother learned lively loving attentiveness--we might be hearing a psalmist's praise of God's plenty. Writing it all down with a catching eye and ear and touch, he leaves his children what legacy he can:
I often pulld my hat over my eyes to watch the rising of the lark or to see the hawk hang in the summer sky & the kite take its circle round the wood I often lingered a minute on the woodland stile to hear the woodpigeons clapping their wings among the dark oaks I hunted curious flowers in rapture & muttered thoughts in their praise I lovd the pasture with its rushes & thistles & sheep tracks I adored the wild marshy fen with its solitary hernshaw sweeing [heron swinging] along in its mellancholy sky I wandered the heath in raptures among the rabbit burrows & golden blossomd furze I dropt down on the thymy molehill or mossy eminence to survey the summer landscape as full of rapture as nowClare's vigor, finesse, integrity, surprise, and joy have been put forward by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, while for Pulitzer Prize-winner Carolyn Kizer he's "without doubt the most neglected great poet in our language." Edward Thomas, Galway Kinnell, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, Robert Hass single him out. What sort of writer is this, still scarcely noticed, who outsold Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats for a time?
At first laughed at by his parents, he "hit upon a harmless deception by repeating my poems over a book as though I was reading it this had the desird effect they often praisd them & said if I coud write as good I shoud do." His father had a horde of songs by heart, so there was much singing at home. Eventually his mother stopped lighting the fire with scraps of paper she found stuffed in crannies, and encouraged his writing.
With little schooling but greatly self-taught, Clare worked around Helpston as a thresher with his father, as ploughboy, or potboy in an inn, or weeding, tending horses, gardening, shoemaking, lime-burning. For pleasure he was an avid botanist and ornithologist, learned fiddling from the gypsies, and collected hundreds of local folk tunes. By husbanding a few shillings, at thirteen he purchased James Thomson's popular The Seasons, which inspired him to set down some poems of his own. When a local bookseller showed them to Keats's publisher, this led to a first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). An instant hit, reprinted three times within the year, here was what Wordsworth had called for, "the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation," though Clare was seen more as a rustic wonder. He met the literati in London and aristocrats sponsored him, sometimes arriving in carriages at his rough cottage to call him in from the fields where he was busy reaping wheat. This cost him wages.
Though they never met, Clare doubted Keats, finding too many dryads and naiads in his woods: "In spite of all this his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies & not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described." He must have liked the "last oozings hours by hours" of Keats's cider press, though, and his "stubble-plains." About Clare's verses, Keats said: "Images from Nature are too much introduced without being called for by a particular Sentiment." Clare's editor/publisher wanted him to "speak of the Appearances of Nature ... more philosophically."
More sentiment, more philosophy? That's just the point. Feeling and thought fuse in sheer description when Clare pulls his hat over his eyes to watch "the hawk hang in the summer sky" or drops down rapt "on the thymy molehill." It's true, his fine poems to autumn and the nightingale don't brim with tension like Keats's odes years before. But Clare has his music too, plus a unique, witnessing energy.
Even an early unpublished poem, recalling childhood winter mornings, gets that freshness into a loosely woven sonnet:
The schoolboys still their morning rambles take
To neighboring village school with playing speed
Loitering with pastimes leisure till they quake
Oft looking up the wild geese droves to heed
Watching the letters which their journeys make
Or plucking awes on which the fieldfares feed
And hips and sloes--and on each shallow lake
Making glib slides where they like shadows go
Till some fresh pastimes in their minds awake
And off they start anew and hasty blow
Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow
Then races with their shadows wildly run
That stride, huge giants, o'er the shining snow
In the pale splendour of the winter sun.After awkward inversions and rhymes, those "letters" made by "wild geese droves" renew an indelible memory, while "awes" (hawthorn berries) and "fieldfares" (thrushes) hold onto earlier, native English. So do "glib"--not "flippant," as nowadays, but the original dialect sense of "slippery"--and "clumpsing," numb with cold. When the schoolboys "races with their shadows wildly run," that inversion lets the rhyme on "wildly run" and the light from "shining snow" shape a majestic pentameter. Clare's verse rising from "clumpsing" to "splendour" opens endlessly under winter sun.
Country sights merit the same care as celestial vision: "I usd to drop down under a bush & scribble the fresh thoughts on the crown of my hat as I found nature then." (And what's become of that magic hat?) He says, "I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down." Instead of devaluing his craft, humbleness turns up as much splendor as sublimity does. "The Nightingale's Nest" leads us through 75 lines of seasonal change, boyhood excursions, birdsong "Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves," through branches and brambles and nearby alarms, before we find the nest:
no other bird
Uses such loose materials or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots--dead oaken leaves
Are placed without and velvet moss within
And little scraps of grass and, scant and spare,
What scarcely seem materials, down and hair.Now he actually counts the eggs and corrects his sense of their color, vivifying and verifying a poet's Eden:
Snug lie her curious eggs in number five
Of deadened green or rather olive-brown,
And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.
So here we'll leave them, still unknown to wrong,
As the old woodland's legacy of song.One breath moves him from olive-brown eggs and a thorn bush to the legacy of song.
Clare had cause to look back longingly on "nature's preserve" where he grew up, "the lonely nooks in the fields & woods & my favorite spots ... before enclosure destroyed them." In 1809, when he was 16, Parliament passed an Act for the Enclosure of Helpston and neighboring parishes. For centuries the village had lain among huge fields, woods, heath, and wasteland whose talismanic names spot Clare's prose and poems: Lolham Bridges, Oxey Woods, Woodcroft Field, Emmonsales Heath, Round Oak Spring, Swordy Well. Now fences and other barriers enclosed the open and common lands for private use, setting rectangular bounds on a world that once centered in Helpston and ranged out freely in the circle of a child's roving.
The parish of Helpston: left, in 1809, before the enclosure; right, in 1820, after the enclosure. From John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972).
That "wandering scene" is gone, Clare says in "The Moors": "Its only bondage was the circling sky." The "wild pasture," the "commons wild and gay" of "my boyish hours / Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers," the "brook that dribbled on," the "sky-bound moors" are all blocked where "Fence now meets fence in owners' little bounds." Where there werepaths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice "no road here,"blocking body and spirit both. If Wordsworth's seedtime when "I bounded o'er the mountains" has fled, he can still revisit the "wild secluded" cliffs above Tintern Abbey. Inspired by Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, Clare feels politically as well as personally threatened:
Enclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave.It also closed off childhood freedoms and their encircling world that only "the horison's edge surrounds."
A circle of wild yet intimate terrain and a rounded nest both belong to that loss, as in the old French proverb, Homme sans abris, Oiseau sans nid, "Man with no shelter, Bird with no nest." And Clare knew his birds. His ongoing Natural History of Helpston records scores of species, many of them first sightings in his county. Again and again in his bird's-nest poems the word "snug" occurs, along with "safe" and "sheltered": "how snug" the lark's nest "in a horse's footing [footprint] fixed!" In "The Pettichap's Nest," featured by Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth, Clare finds this tiny warbler building "close by the rut-gulled waggon road," with no grass clump or thistle spears or prickly bush as shield from sheep, horses, oxen. Lined with feathers and pea-sized eggs so delicate a "green grasshopper's jump might break the shells," her nest speaks for the Helpston poet: seeking a safe center, vulnerable, surviving.
Animals, too, inhabit the circle John Clare simply found himself in. A grunting badger hunted by "dogs and men" turns and fights for hours, "tries to reach the woods," "sticks and cudgels" beat him,
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans and dies.Any moralizing would only weaken the spate of verbs driven by "and" and "and" and "and," and the shock of "cackles," and that last line's falling cadence.
Turning thirty, Clare had his first bouts of severe depression, on top of poverty, seven children to feed, publishing troubles, anguish at enclosure, and an unwanted move from his birthplace. Though only three miles away, this displacement meant a loss of place, "Green fields and every pleasant place," "places known so long":
I miss the heath, its yellow furze
Molehills and rabbit tracks that lead
Through besom ling and teasel burrs
That spread a wilderness indeedHallucinations and worsening depression send him to a private asylum near London. Four years later he walks off the grounds one July morning and in old cracked shoes makes his way back home, over 80 miles in four days, lying down in sheds when he can "with my head towards the north to show myself the steering point in the morning," living on grass, a chaw of tobacco, and a pint of ale when someone tosses him a few pennies. At St. Ives he rests on a flint heap, at Stilton "I was compleatly foot-foundered & broken down."
After a few months, "homeless at home," he is confined to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for his last 24 years. His wife never visits, but the asylum steward, William Knight, transcribes and preserves Clare's poems. All told, he wrote over 3500. Those few published during his lifetime were tidied up for the gentry, in grammar, spelling, punctuation, dialect. The keenest of them tingle with detail, and more than a few strike unforgettable notes: the moorland, whose "only bondage was the circling sky," and the nightingale's song "Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves."
John Felstiner, who teaches at Stanford, published Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal), Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (PEN, MLA, and American Translators Association prizes), and co-edited the Norton anthology Jewish American Literature.
