Читать книгу Poems Chiefly from Manuscript - John Clare - Страница 8

Give my best respects to Mrs. Allen and Miss Allen, and to Dr. Stedman; also to Campbell, and Hayward, and Howard at Leopard's Hill, or in fact to any one who may think it worth while to enquire about me.

Patty worked her hardest to keep Clare out of future asylums, but it seems that her wishes were overridden. Dr. Allen let it be known through the Gentleman's Magazine and other publications that Clare would in the ordinary way almost certainly recover: but the local doctors knew better. On the authority of an anonymous "patron" the doctor Skrimshaw who had previously found Clare insane now paid him another visit, and with a certain William Page, also of Market Deeping, condemned him to be shut up "After years addicted to poetical prosings."

Then one day keepers came, and a vain struggle, and the Northborough cottage saw John Clare no more. He was now in the asylum at Northampton, and the minds of Northamptonshire noblemen need no longer be troubled that a poet was wandering in miserable happiness under their park walls.

So far, the madness of Clare had been rather an exaltation of mind than a collapse. Forsaken mainly by his friends—even Mrs. Emmerson's letters ceased in 1837—unrecognized by the new generation of writers and of readers, hated by his neighbours, wasted with hopeless love, he had encouraged a life of imagination and ideals. Imagination overpowered him, until his perception of realities failed him. He could see Mary Joyce or talk with her, he had a family of dream-children by her: but if this was madness, there was method in it. But now the blow fell, imprisonment for life: down went John Clare into idiocy, "the ludicrous with the terrible." And even from this desperate abyss he rose.

Earl Fitzwilliam paid for Clare's maintenance in the Northampton Asylum, but at the ordinary rate for poor people. The asylum authorities at least seemed to have recognized Clare as a man out of the common, treating him as a "gentleman patient," and allowing him—for the first twelve years—to go when he wished into Northampton, where he would sit under the portico of All Saints' Church in meditation. What dreams were these! "sometimes his face would brighten up as if illuminated by an inward sun, overwhelming in its glory and beauty." Sane intervals came, in which he wrote his poems; and these poems were of a serenity and richness not surpassed in his earlier work, including for instance "Graves of Infants" (May, 1844), "The Sleep of Spring" (1844), "Invitation to Eternity" (1848) and "Clock-a-Clay" (before 1854). But little news of him went farther afield than the town of Northampton, and the poems remained in manuscript. A glimpse of Clare in these years is left us by a Mr. Jesse Hall, who as an admirer of his poems called on him in May, 1848. "As it was a very fine day, he said we could go and have a walk in the grounds of the institution. We discussed many subjects and I found him very rational, there being very little evidence of derangement. … I asked permission for him to come to my hotel the next day. We spent a few hours together. I was very sorry to find a great change in him from the previous day, and I had ample evidence of his reason being dethroned, his conversation being disconnected and many of his remarks displaying imbecility: but at times he spoke rationally and to the point." To Hall as to almost every other casual visitor Clare gave several manuscript poems.

A letter to his wife, dated July 19th, 1848, gives fresh insight into his condition: