John Clare

            Veganism is a very urban idea. Very few people that were raised on farms become vegans because they already live close to nature. Veganism is a misplaced attempt to commune with the nature that city people feel distanced from.

            I was comfortable riding to class with a few layers and my winter gloves, but at Dovercourt and Bloor a thirtyish woman with no coat and wearing a short black dress with black stockings crossed against traffic from the northeast corner diagonally to the southwest corner. She looked like she might be an Indigenous Latin American, perhaps from Brazil.

            At Bloor and Brunswick a guy with a small conga drum was walking around and very loudly and eloquently talking to himself.

            When I got to the classroom there was no Economics class and some of my fellow students had already gone in. Gabriel had set up Professor Weisman’s desk and lecterns and so I just had to roll up the projector screen and the window shades.

            Professor Weisman announced that she had a root canal yesterday and so she’s on codeine and she’s not going to stand as much nor project her voice and so she asked the people at the back to move closer.

            For the last lecture of the year we looked at John Clare, the peasant poet.

            Both John Clare and Charlotte Smith are important for canon formation.

            Clare for a long time was considered a minor Romantic poet but no anymore. He had no formal schooling. He was one of the rustics that Wordsworth admired for their simplicity. There is some criticism that the rustics were a bit of a Roman holiday for the Romantics.

            Clare learned the basics of reading and writing as a child but became a voracious reader and sometimes would fast in order to save the money to buy a book. His writing never developed to a mastery of proper grammar and spelling and there is a lot of debate as to whether his works should be published as written or standardized.

            There was a vogue for peasant poetry when he first became published in 1820.

            He became mentally ill and possibly schizophrenic but his asylum poems are interesting.

            Clare’s poem, "The Lament of Swordy Well" encapsulates many of the themes we’ve studied in this course. It was written in the 1830s but not published until the 20^th Century.

            Swordy Well or Swaddywell Pit was an ancient stone quarry first used by the Romans. In Clare’s youth it served as a waste ground for gathering firewood or for grazing sheep. But then the practice of enclosure came, which decimated common grounds. Tracts were purchased by absentee landlords and worked by hired labourers. Swordy Well was enclosed, converted to private property and was dug up for limestone to use on roads.

            We’ve seen prospect poems and loco descriptive poems about human beings in a landscape but in Swordy Well the landscape is speaking in the voice of homelessness. Nature speaking in the voice of a homeless man was a first for English literature.

            The professor had me read the first four stanzas to the class.

            The landscape is complaining about having been violated. He presents Swordy Well as being from among the parish poor. It is not begging and not trying to attract pity for charity though the poor often have no choice. It is asserting an authority to ask for customary rights and some degree of justice to keep his own because he is still of value.

            Swordy Well’s only justice is poetry and the lament parallels that of the peasant poet. 

            One of the social justice issues was the discussion of leisure, which could not be taken for granted. To experience a landscape at leisure was a rallying point.

            The mention of the absence of butterflies at Swordy Well shows that it is about more than subsistence but also aesthetics.

            There are no streams or soil cover. There is only poetry. There have been permanent changes to the landscape and so it is not enduring like Tintern Abbey. This is a direct counter to Wordsworth. The verse that begins with “There was a time …” is a Wordsworthian account that echoes “The Immortality Ode”.

            Swordy Well barely, but still recognizes his self.

            “Why I call a Christian Turk is they are Turks to me”. “Turk” was a racist term for a cruel and tyrannical man.

            I told the professor that Swordy Well is now a nature preserve and so there is life there again.

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home and bought grapes, raspberries, bread, yogourt and paper towels.

            When I got home I called my doctor’s office to make an appointment to see him early Thursday afternoon about my shin injury, because it doesn’t seem to be getting any better after two weeks. 

            I typed out my lecture notes.

            Though Wednesday nights I usually have a beer with dinner I skipped it this time so I could focus on preparing for my exam the next day. I didn’t watch Peter Gunn for the same reason. I had a quick snack of some kuna pops and a slice of bread with cheese at my computer and kept on studying.