Poem of the Day: ‘A Look at the Heavens’

The life of the English poet John Clare (1793-1864) overlapped significantly with both Wordsworth and Tennyson, and with both Romanticism and Victorianism — to neither of which did Clare precisely belong. The son of a Northamptonshire farm laborer, Clare himself worked on the land, nurturing in himself a deep affinity for it and for the traditional society that had long coexisted with the countryside. He felt the developments of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions — the draining of the fens, for example, which had defined an entire way of life in East Anglia — as a personal shock. Sensitive and eccentric to the point of incarceration in a mental asylum (the listed cause of insanity was “years of poetical prosings”), he remained nevertheless a straightforwardly devout Anglican, conservative in all his outlooks. Today’s sonnet-like sixteen-line poem, “A Look at the Heavens,” with its complicated rhyme scheme, with beginning and ending couplets that bracket abab quatrains, echoes Psalm 19 in asserting that the heavens are telling the glory of God.