Clock a Clay

1
In the cowslips peeps I lye

Hidden from the buzzing fly

While green grass beneath me lies

Pearled wi’ dew like fishes eyes

Here I lye a Clock a clay

Waiting for the time o’day

2


While grassy forests quake surprise
And the wild wind sobs and sighs

My gold home rocks as like to fall

On its pillars green and tall

When the pattering rain drives bye

Clock a Clay keeps warm and dry


3

Day by day and night by night
All the week I hide from sight
In the cowslips peeps I lye
In rain and dew still warm and dry
Day and night and night and day
Red black spotted clock a clay

4

My home it shakes in wind and showers

Pale green pillar top’t wi’ flowers

Bending at the wild wind’s breath
Till I touch the grass beneath

Here still I live lone clock a clay

Watching for the time of day

It’s idle, but still fun sometimes to imagine how poets of the past might practise their art if they were writing in the 21st century. Would Chaucer have relocated to the continent of Africa to be granted honorary membership of the Africanfuturists? Milton and Shakespeare would likely have made innovative cinema, combining their gifts for dramatic narrative with eloquent but colloquial verse-dialogue. By fast-forwarding this trio into the future, the iambic pentameter might have begun to fracture long before Ezra Pound delivered his elegant kicks in its direction – but that’s another, longer story.

My train of what-ifs was set running by this week’s poem, Clock a Clay by John Clare. Its speaker is the beetle more commonly known as the ladybird, a species whose population is now in serious decline. Tom Clark, in a beautifully pictorial blogpost tells us the term originated in the idea that you could tell the time by counting the hours before a ladybird, perched on your hand, obeyed your injunction to “fly away home”. A variant explanation refers to the number of foot-taps needed to scare the insect from a plant. This is the one I’d guess to be the most likely, since “clay” more immediately suggests the soil underfoot than the metaphorical clay of the human hand.

Fewer of Clare’s poems observe insects than birds, animals and plants. All the same, there are bees in plenty, ants, butterflies – and other ladybirds. A letter to his first publishers, John Taylor and James Hussey, is illuminating: “I have often been amused with the manners and habits of Insects but I am not acquainted with entemology to know the names they go bye,” Clare begins. He then records a patient investigation of the co-operative feeding-habits of beetles. While weeding a beanfield, he watches a small green beetle attacking a large moth. The moth dispatched, the beetle disappears, leaving its prey largely uneaten, but subsequently returns with a beetle-companion, both of whom depart again and return with more companions until there are six altogether to share the feast. Clare finishes, “I have often amused myself in summer lying in the grass to see the quantities of different insects passing and repassing as if going to a market or fair some climbing up bents and rushes like so many church steeples and others getting out of the sun into the bosoms of flower [s] the most common seen in these busy motions is the long legged shepherd the green beetle and red and yellow lady flyes.”

Giving voice to the clock a clay, enclosed in the “peeps” (petals) of a cowslip, Clare is also, to some degree, describing his own condition in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he composed the verses, safely housed (and free, within limits, to come and go) but uneasy, as always, with the condition of enclosure. The clock a clay knows itself minuscule compared to its environment. Cowslips grow to no great height but the little beetle perceives the stalks as “pillars green and tall”, and imagines the grass as forest, the dewdrops as “fishes eyes”. We might think of Clare not only in the asylum but in the not-altogether-safe house of English 19th-century poetry. There’s a constant tension for the beetle between the weather, the wind and showers that shake its home, and its sense of being kept cosily warm and dry. Repeated lines maintain the tension with subtle variations of balance across four effortless-seeming stanzas.

Unlike the green beetles in the beanfield, this “red black spotted clock a clay” is a solitary creature. Its resemblance to the poet is emphasised in the last stanza with the interposed qualifiers, “still” and “lone”: “Here still I live lone clock a clay / Watching for the time of day.” But there’s a merry beat in the tetrameter line and the tightly interwoven rhymes, suggesting perhaps the lightly stamping feet of children in a skipping game. The clock a clay is hardly overwhelmed by dejection, and, enjoying the privileges of its wind-rocked “gold home”, may be a kindred spirit with Shakespeare’s Ariel.

So, back to the what-if game. If Clare had been born in 1993 instead of 1793 he’d probably be a great eco-folk singer, with a recent triumphant debut at Glastonbury. Or he might lead the environmental poet-activists, now with a fully developed knowledge of entomology under his cap, and new visual technology to enhance his fieldwork. He might be a very popular children’s poet on the schools circuit. Or even all three. His poetic diction would be different, of course, but not ill at ease in the dialect-entwined rivers of British mainstream. In what I like to think of as the Battle of the Nightingales, John Clare the realist is ahead of John Keats the Romantic. He would be the voice of environmentalism, and he would be heard. May your voice still wake us from across the centuries, John Clare!