John Clare

Life and Remains of John Clare: The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet

'Tis evening; the black snail has got on his track,
And gone to its nest is the wren,

packman snail

A packman is a traveling peddler carrying goods on his back—Clare doubles the image by making the snail both traveler and merchant, both creature and its shell-home.

And the packman snail, too, with his home on his back,
Clings to the bowed bents like a wen.
The shepherd has made a rude mark with his foot

rude mark

'Rude' means rough or crude here, not impolite. The shepherd is calculating time by his shadow's length—a peasant's sundial.

Where his shadow reached when he first came,
And it just touched the tree where his secret love cut

Two letters

Probably initials—either the lover's or both lovers' first letters. Tree-carving was the rural working-class version of love letters.

Two letters that stand for love's name.
The evening comes in with the wishes of love,
And the shepherd he looks on the flowers,
And thinks who would praise the soft song of the dove,
And meet joy in these dew-falling hours.
For Nature is love, and finds haunts for true love,
Where nothing can hear or intrude;
It hides from the eagle and joins with the dove,

eagle and dove

Traditional opposition: the eagle represents predatory power and surveillance, the dove represents peace and love. Nature chooses sides.

In beautiful green solitude.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Title's Irony

The title comes from Clare's 1865 biography, published 14 years after his death in an asylum. By calling him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet," publishers marketed Clare as a curiosity—the self-educated farm laborer who somehow wrote poetry. The label was both his ticket to publication and his cage.

This poem subverts that framing. The shepherd here isn't a quaint rural figure for middle-class readers to admire. He's doing complex astronomical calculation (tracking time by shadow length), engaging with literary tradition (the carved initials), and experiencing sophisticated emotional states. Clare insists that peasant life contains intellectual and romantic depth, not just picturesque poverty.

The poem's careful structure—four quatrains with ABAB rhyme—demonstrates that Clare commands formal technique. He's not a "natural" poet stumbling into verse, but a craftsman who knows exactly what he's doing. The "peasant poet" label tried to explain away his skill as instinct; the poem itself is the rebuttal.

Clare's Precision with Small Things

Clare was famous for microscopic natural observation—he noticed what other Romantic poets overlooked. The "black snail" and "packman snail" are likely different species: the former might be the black slug (Arion ater), the latter a banded snail carrying its shell. Most poets would write "snails" and move on. Clare distinguishes them.

"Clings to the bowed bents like a wen" shows this precision at work. Bents are a specific type of grass (bent-grass), not just "grass" in general. A wen is a cyst or growth—the snail on the bent grass stalk looks like a tumor on skin. It's an unusual, almost medical simile that makes you see the exact visual.

This attention to tiny detail has a political edge. Clare's enclosure poetry protested the fencing-off of common lands that destroyed peasant life. Here, the small creatures—snails, wrens, doves—claim their space in "beautiful green solitude." The eagle (often a symbol of aristocratic power) is explicitly excluded. Clare's microscopically observed natural world is also a vision of refuge from the social forces that were destroying his community.