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I don't know if you know
who the poet John Clare is,

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the 19th-century mad and
charming nature poet.

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This poem is to him.

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There are three little
quotations in it.

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I hope you can tell when
they're not my words.

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They're from his diaries.

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And there's a reference to
Honeywell, where I worked up

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until the time they started
making torpedoes back in '66.

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And I dedicate this
to Mark Halperin,

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who wrote the first, shortest,
and best John Clare poem.

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"If John Clare gave a
reading of his poetry,

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what show would he put on?

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What clothes?

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He would soon be escaping
to his realist world.

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He would need shoes.

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We would not let you alone,
John, bright, Clare, lunatic.

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And might you like that?

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Not to be lonely, left?

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And every Mary
turning to your door?

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John Clare, John Clare,
I stole your portrait

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from a library book.

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I put it over my
desk at Honeywell.

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And during some night, it fell.

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It fell, and the
janitor swept it away.

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Pastoral poems are
full of nothing

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but the old threadbare epithets.

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We await one who loves.

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We bury him.

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We rediscover the most
intimate of poets,

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too grieved to be
called confessional.

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On pootys-- blackbirds and
thrushes, particularly,

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the former, in hard--

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feed in hard winters
upon the shale--

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pardon me-- shale snail
horns, hunting them

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from hedge bottoms
and wood stulps,

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taking them to a stone
where they break them

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in a very dexterous manner.

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There is no judgment there,
where birds and pootys are not

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people.

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Simply what happens is mad.

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Then it is sane again
before you know.

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You have come in
smiling from the storm.

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Each year, in a row, we were
given Shelley, Clare, Songs

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of Experience,
Keats, then deaths

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of all the wild and melancholy.

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When Clare dies at
Northampton, 1864,

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Yeats is born the next year.

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Would this age be kinder?

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Or would we confuse
you on what you love?

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You blessed your two wives.

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The man whose daughter
is the Queen of England

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is now sitting on a stone
heap, on a highway to bugden,

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penniless, with gnawing stomach.

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I go out into the sunshine
with his green book,

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and sit on the stair, and say
with the reader's silliness,

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John Clare is here."

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