John Clare's Recollections of Home: The Poetics of Nostalgia

Nostalgia: 'A form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's country or home' OED.John Clare called one of his last poems, written while he was a patient in the Northampton Asylum (and transcribed by the asylum attendant, William Knight), 'Recolections of Home'. Unlike most of the poetry written during his years of confinement in that asylum it is coherent (if unfinished) and personal:1When we stray far away from the old pleasant villageWe love it the fonder the further awayThe sweet pleasant songs of ploughmen oer their villageAre more pleasant sounds than the strange calls to dayThat sweet little homestead with pollard ash and pondLeads back a hundred miles wherever I may roamA dove cotes wooden home where the pigeons coo so fondSoon bring to my eye my own at the old house at home2The very layer of crab that's wattled in the hedgeThe old post in its red paint crushed with waggons rushing throughThe teazles prickly burrs or the little hubs of sedgeWill bring me to the old place where I lived a moon agoBut the flowers here they tell me in their brown, red, white & blueThat their sisters are now in the fields around my house at homeThough the sun here shines as bright, and as christal be the dewThey are not so sweet as those flowers that in our meadows grew3A mossy plank across the flood though weedy be the dykeHere fifty miles away and I cross another streamIt brings me to my own fields the brigs so very likeSo here I only wander in the middle of a dreamAt home I did right cozie and lived as I would chooseAnd saw nothing but my sweet fields day after day'Till I was forced to flee my corner and the museAs the linnet from its nest by the awk is drove away4I always see a bit of home in every likely thingA white-thorn hedge, or bramble bush or pollard willow treeBrings me my own snug homestead, and the budding of the spring1Here is his characteristically detailed description of features of the countryside of his birth (the 'teazles prickly burrs', 'the little hubs of sedge') remembered with nostalgia for the 'old house at home'. Here is the insistence that those features, however lovely, are not as lovely as the ones he was familiar with 'at home'. But, the feeling is less fervent than in 'The Flitting', his best-known poem about leaving home, written some ten or more years earlier. Clare had more reason than most to feel a melancholy longing for the place that he called home, but, as I shall argue, even his early poems on that subject are imbued with a melancholy longing that cannot be accounted for by 'prolonged absence'. It is always tempting to read Clare's poetry autobiographically, and I have not resisted that temptation, but rather than following a strictly chronological approach (difficult in any case, because so often it is impossible to date Clare's poems with precision), I shall be tracing three themes running through his poetry about home: the image of a nest, the picture of the shepherd's cottage, and the sense of estrangement which he captures most memorably in the paradox of being 'homeless at home'.Gaston Bachelard, in his imaginative interpretation of the ways in which we characterise domestic spaces sees the nest as a 'primal image', one that brings out the primitiveness in us, one that takes us back to our childhood.2 He recognises the temptation as well as the absurdity of 'images that attribute human qualities to a nest'.3 Clare, on the other hand, knowledgeable as few others are of the things, the twigs, fibres, and other bits and pieces that make up nests, but for whom personification is a key poetic trope, is unselfconscious in his frequent references to the nest as a home, a dwelling, or as in the sonnet, 'Birds Nests', a 'hermitage':& still hedge sparrow moping in the shadeNear the hedge bottom weaves of homely stuffDead grass & mosses green an hermitageFor secresy & shelter rightly madeAnd beautiful it is to walk besideThe lanes & hedges where their homes abide4Discussing Clare's birds' nest poetry, John Goodridge comments that nests are one of the key 'image groupings' associated with the enclosure elegies, 'an archetypal representation of safety and nurture'. …