The Poet Peasant

Who in his right mind would get himself committed,
not pressurised or compelled but by his own volition?
One such person was John Clare, the “Peasant Poet”,
who at the asylum of Dr. Matthew Allen was admitted.

And it had been on the advice of his publisher friend.
High Beach, near Loughton, was a private institution
where he stayed for four years till eighteen-forty-one
but to remain, and settle in Essex, he did not intend.

He absconded from the asylum and walked 80 miles
in four days, on foot, alone, penniless, sleeping rough.
He believed he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce,
that she would receive him with hugs and smiles.

Convinced he was married to her (and Martha as well)
did not accept she’d died three years earlier in a fire.
He remained free, mostly at home, for five months;
all this time Martha, also known as Patty, suffered hell.

In desperation ‘Patty’ asked the doctors to intervene;
they referred Clare to the Northampton Lunatic Asylum
where Dr. Thomas Pritchard encouraged him to write
poems about nature and rural life that are evergreen.

He died aged seventy-one after a troubled existence.
Was said to have endured mental emotion and exertion
due, as a physician put it, to ‘years of poetical prosing’.
He had problems but succeeded because of persistence.

© Luigi Pagano 2014