Two Poens (“Secret Love” & “And what is life?”) [by John Clare, 1793-1864]

Secret Love

I hid my love when young till I

Couldn’t bear the buzzing of a fly;

I hid my love to my despite

Till I could not bear to look at light:

I dare not gaze upon her face

But left her memory in each place;

Where’er I saw a wild flower lie

I kissed and bade my love good-bye.

I met her in the greenest dells,

Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells;

The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,

The bee kissed and went singing by,

A sunbeam found a passage there,

A gold chain round her neck so fair;

As secret as the wild bee’s song

She lay there all the summer long.

I hid my love in field and town

Till e’en the breeze would knock me down;

The bees seemed singing ballads o’er,

The fly’s bass turned a lion’s roar;

And even silence found a tongue,

To haunt me all the summer long;

The riddle nature could not prove

Was nothing else but secret love.

And what is Life? An hour-glass on the run,

A mist retreating from the morning sun,

A busy, bustling, still-repeated dream.

Its length? A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought.

And Happiness? A bubble on the stream,

That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

And what is Hope? The puffing gale of morn,

That of its charms divests the dewy lawn,

And robs each flow’ret of its gem -and dies;

A cobweb, hiding disappointment’s thorn,

Which stings more keenly through the thin disguise.

And what is Death? Is still the cause unfound?

That dark mysterious name of horrid sound?

A long and lingering sleep the weary crave.

And Peace? Where can its happiness abound?

Nowhere at all, save heaven and the grave.

Then what is Life? When stripped of its disguise,

A thing to be desired it cannot be;

Since everything that meets our foolish eyes

Gives proof sufficient of its vanity.

‘Tis but a trial all must undergo,

To teach unthankful mortals how to prize

That happiness vain man’s denied to know,

Until he’s called to claim it in the skies.

Ed. note: The English Romantic poet John Clare spent his last twenty-seven years in asylums for the mad. What ailed him? In twenty-first century terms you might say he suffered from bipolar disorder and a protracted identity crisis. He also endured a mean bout of malaria and took to heart the failure of an early love affair with a farmer’s daughter named Mary Joyce. In July 1841, he escaped from the private asylum where he had spent the four previous years. He walked eighty miles to Northborough, ate grass to keep from starving, and wrote up his adventures in an prose account dediucated to “Mary Clare,” his imaginary wife.Later that year, he was certified as insane and brought to St. Andrew’s Asylum, in Northampton where he proceeded to write some of his best poems . He said he found his poems “in the fields.” All he did was “write them down.”— DL

“grammar in learning is like tyranny in government – confound the bitch I’ll never be her slave.”

― John Clare

And here is Clare’s contriobution to the anthology of great two-line poems:

“Language has not the power to speak what love indites

The soul lies buried in the Ink that writes.”