‘Such was thy ruin, music-making elm…’

Earlier this year, for the anniversary of John Clare’s birthday (13th July 1793), his sonnet Summer Shower was read out on Radio 3’s Breakfast programme:

Black grows the southern sky betokening rain,

And humming hive-bees homeward hurry by;

They feel the change — so let us shun the grain,

And take the broad road while our feet are dry.

Ay, there some dropples moistened on my face,

And pattered on my hat — ’tis coming nigh!

Let’s look about, and find a sheltering place.

The little things around, like you and I,

Are hurrying through the grass to shun the shower.

Here stoops an ash-tree — hark! the wind gets high,

But never mind; this ivy, for an hour,

Rain as it may, will keep us dryly here:

That little wren knows well his sheltering bower,

Nor leaves his dry house though we come so near.

So unmistakeably Clare — the detail, the directness, the demonstrativeness.  No pretention, no clever devices, only the immediacy of his journalistic jottings.  ‘This ivy’, ‘that little wren’ — we are there under the ash-tree with him.

This prompted me to return to his poems, after too long an absence.  Reading them over the past few months I have been struck once again by his sheer alertness to his surroundings, to every detail of his ‘home turf’, and also by his self-awareness: he sees not only what he goes looking for, but himself as he looks, pulling his hat over his eyes or crawling on his hands and knees through the undergrowth, a creature like any of the others.

‘I often pulled my hat over my eyes to watch the rising of the lark, or to see the hawk hang in the summer sky and the kite take its circles 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 and muttered thoughts in their praise. I loved the pasture with its rushes and thistles and sheep-tracks.  I adored the wild, marshy fen with its solitary heronshaw sweeing along in its melancholy sky. I wandered the heath in raptures among the rabbit burrows and golden-blossomed firze.  I dropt down on a thymy mole-hill or mossy eminence to survey the summer landscape… I marked the various colours in flat, spreading fields, checkered into closes of different-tinctured grain like the colours of a map; the copper-tinted clover in blossom; the sun-tanned green of the ripening hay; the lighter charlock and the sunset imitation of the scarlet headaches; the blue corn-bottles crowding their splendid colours in large sheets over the land and troubling the cornfields with destroying beauty; the different greens of the woodland trees, the dark oak, the paler ash, the mellow lime, the white poplars peeping above the rest like leafy steeples, the grey willow shining in the sun, as if the morning mist still lingered on its cool green… I observed all this with the same rapture as l have done since.  But I knew nothing of poetry.  It was felt and not uttered.’

— from Clare’s Autobiography

But as well as this delighted detail I was also struck again by the grief, and indeed by the anger in his verse.  He had good reason for both.  He of all poets, he of all nature-lovers, had the misfortune to live at the time of the Enclosures Act, and as a young man was himself employed actually to drive in the fence-posts that closed him off forever from the heaths and woodlands of his childhood.  Of course these landscapes were often subsequently physically destroyed, so that Clare was an exile in his own parish.  This experience almost certainly contributed to the mental distress of his later life.

What do I mean by the bitterness and anger?  One poem in particular struck me, ‘The Fallen Elm’, from The Midsummer Cushion (1824).  It begins in a typical Clareian minor key: an unvarnished portrait of country life, with its mingled discomforts and consolations.  But then comes a line which tightens the whole pitch of the poem: ‘Old favourite tree, thou’st seen times changes lower / But change till now did never injure thee.’  There follows a remarkable outburst at the injustice of those who have felled the elm in the name of false freedom, whom he repeatedly calls ‘hypocrites’: ‘Self interest saw thee stand in freedom's ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be.’  The tree has to go not because of what it is but because of how it is seen by the all-conquering Self: as an obstacle.  ‘With axe at root he felled thee to the ground / And barked of freedom.  O I hate the sound!’, and we cannot tell whether it is the sound of the blows of the axe that he hates, or the barked slogans of freedom.  Perhaps precisely because of his eye for detail and love of the particular, Clare had no patience for vague, abstract notions like ‘freedom’ which, in liberating only the elm’s destroyers at the expense of its friends, destroyed the irreplaceable intricacies of his world.

Then comes the coda with the unbearable, tear -startling line, ‘Such was thy ruin, music-making elm’.  I think we all know this feeling, of rage and grief and powerlessness in seeing some old, benevolent, protective heirloom hacked to pieces in the name of progress, or freedom so-called, or some other shallow abstraction often merely a euphemism for naked self-interest.

Old elm that murmured in our chimney top

The sweetest anthem autumn ever made

And into mellow whispering calms would drop

When showers fell on thy many-coloured shade

And when dark tempests mimic thunder made

While darkness came as it would strangle light

With the black tempest of a winter night

That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root,

How did I love to hear the winds upbraid

Thy strength without – while all within was mute.

It seasoned comfort to our hearts’ desire,

We felt thy kind protection like a friend

And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire,

Enjoying comforts that was never penned.

Old favourite tree, thou’st seen times changes lower,

But change till now did never injure thee,

For time beheld thee as his sacred dower

And nature claimed thee her domestic tree;

Storms came and shook thee many a weary hour,

Yet steadfast to thy home thy roots hath been;

Summers of thirst parched round thy homely bower

Till earth grew iron — still thy leaves was green.

The childern sought thee in thy summer shade

And made their play house rings of sticks and stone;

The mavis sang and felt himself alone

While in they leaves his early nest was made

And I did feel his happiness mine own,

Nought heeding that our friendship was betrayed —

Friend not inanimate—though stocks and stones

There are and many formed of flesh and bones

Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred

Deeper than by a feeling clothed in words,

And speakest now what’s known of every tongue

Language of pity and the force of wrong.

What cant assumes, what hypocrites may dare

Speaks home to truth and shows it what they are.

I see a picture that thy fate displays

And learn a lesson from thy destiny:

Self interest saw thee stand in freedom’s ways

So thy old shadow must a tyrant be

Thou’st heard the knave abusing those in power

Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free;

Thou’st sheltered hypocrites in many an hour

That when in power would never shelter thee;

Thou’st heard the knave supply his canting powers

With wrong’s illusions when he wanted friends

That bawled for shelter when he lived in showers

And when clouds vanished made thy shade amends —

With axe at root he felled thee to the ground

And barked of freedom.  O I hate the sound!

Time hears its visions speak and age sublime

Had made thee a disciple unto time.

It grows the cant term of enslaving tools

To wrong another by the name of right;

It grows the licence of o’erbearing fools

To cheat plain honesty by force of might.

Thus came enclosure — ruin was its guide

But freedom’s clapping hands enjoyed the sight

Though comfort’s cottage soon was thrust aside

And workhouse prisons raised upon the site.

E’en nature’s dwelling far away from men —

The common heath — became the spoilers’ prey:

The rabbit had not where to make his den

And labour’s only cow was drove away

No matter — wrong was right and right was wrong

And freedom’s brawl was sanction to the song.

 — Such was thy ruin, music-making elm:

The rights of freedom was to injure thine.

As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm

In freedom’s name the little that is mine.

And there are knaves that brawl for better laws

And cant of tyranny in stronger powers

Who glut their vile unsatiated maws,

And freedom’s birthright from the weak devours.

This is a poem altogether worthy of its place in the canon of fallen-tree poems — I think in particular of Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars’ and Vernon Watkins’ ‘Trees in a Town’ — and in late September the same anger burned in me as I read of the sawing down of the eponymous tree of Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall — apparently out of pure spite, and without the grace even to pretend some justification of of ‘freedom’ or practicality or self-interest.  Such wanton destruction, such malice that is so hard to forgive: it is no surprise that such deeds roused even gentle men like Clare to righteous anger.

John Constable, ‘Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree’, c. 1821.  (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Poems from John Clare (ed. Jonathan Bate), Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).