A Garland for John Clare: Nature’s Eternal Song and Summer’s Busy Choir

July 13, 2020

Today we remember the English poet John Clare, born on this day in 1793 in the humble village of Helpston.

Known as “the peasant poet,” Clare rose from rural obscurity to literary recognition through his gift for observing the natural world with honesty, tenderness, and precision.

Unlike the grand landscapes of the Romantics, Clare’s vision was close to the ground—roots, furrows, nests, and hedgerows. He wrote not about nature as an idea, but as a living companion.

Each year on his birthday, the children of Helpston still honor him with a beautiful custom called “Clare’s Posies.”

They gather flowers from fields and gardens—daisies, cornflowers, clover—and lay them on his grave, reciting their own poems in his memory. It is perhaps the gentlest tribute any poet could receive: verse meeting bloom, both born of the same earth he so loved.

In his sonnet “All Nature Has a Feeling,” Clare distills his reverence for the eternal pulse beneath the surface of things.

To him, death and decay are not endings but renewals—a philosophy rooted in both soil and spirit:

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal; and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.
— John Clare, English poet, All Nature Has a Feeling

What modern ecology calls a cycle, Clare intuited with poetic grace centuries ago. The woods and brooks speak not of end, but of continuity—a promise that life merely changes its form, never its essence. His was a spirituality born of the land itself.

In another poem, “July,” Clare captures summer in its loud, shimmering fullness.

Here, he listens to that chorus of life—the hum of insects, the whisper of wind—that fills the countryside at its zenith:

Loud is the summer's busy song
The smallest breeze can find a tongue,
While insects of each tiny size
Grow teasing with their melodies,
Till noon burns with its blistering breath
Around, and day lies still as death.
— John Clare, English poet, July

In just a few lines, Clare evokes the paradox of midsummer: its relentless abundance and its stifling stillness, the way sound itself seems to hover in the heat.

His ear catches every nuance of what he called “the language of nature.” Even silence becomes part of the music.

John Clare’s poetry endures because it preserves something pure—a love of the world as it is, unembellished and immediate.

In his lines, there is no distance between poet and pasture, between person and planet.

On this July day, when gardens hum and meadows glow, it feels right to pause, gather a small posy, and place it somewhere quiet in his honor. He would have understood exactly what it meant.