Audiobook · read by volunteers
Selected Poems of John Clare, Volume 2
John Clare (1793–1864)
Read by David Barnes · 15 chapters · 34 min
About the book
John Clare was a farm labourer who loved the fields and hedgerows around his home, and who found the words to describe them. This second selection from his poems gathers fifteen of his bird poems, among them verses addressed to the snipe, a poem about birds' nests and a tender note on two swallows seen late in October. Clare wrote about the creatures and plants of the Northamptonshire countryside with the closeness of a man who had watched them every day. His language, full of local words, is plain and fresh, and his poems often carry a quiet sadness for a landscape that was changing around him. David Barnes reads each poem in turn, and the whole selection lasts little more than half an hour. They are simple, close to the earth and easy to love.
Introduction
John Clare was born in 1793 in Helpston, Northamptonshire, and died in 1864. The son of a farm labourer, he worked on the land from boyhood, and he had little formal schooling. In 1820 his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery appeared, and he was briefly the talk of literary London, where he was often introduced as the peasant poet. Later books received a more modest welcome, and he spent his last decades in asylums, where he continued to write.
His poetry is rooted in the place he knew. He watched birds, insects, flowers and weather with great precision, and he wrote about them without sentimentality, in the speech of his own district. The enclosure of common land, which changed the countryside he loved, is a sorrowful undercurrent in much of his work. For a long time he was neglected by critics, but today he is regarded as one of the finest English poets of nature, and perhaps the most original.
This is the second volume of selected poems in the LibriVox catalogue. It contains 15 bird poems and lasts about half an hour, all read by one volunteer, David Barnes. The poems are short, and the listener can move from one to the next with ease. They are a good way to hear the English countryside through the eyes of someone who truly belonged to it.
Clare's lines are clear and direct, and they are easy to follow even for those who rarely read poetry. Listening to them one after another gives a good sense of his range, from sharp observation to quiet grief, and of the countryside he loved so deeply.
Public domain
John Clare died in 1864: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive