‘Sauntering at ease I often love to lean

Oer old bridge walls and mark the flood below 

Whose ripples through the weeds of oily green 

Like happy travellers mutter as they go 

And mark the sunshine dancing on the arch

Time keeping to the merry waves beneath

And on the banks see drooping blossoms parch 

Thirsting for water in the days hot breath

Right glad of mud drops plashed upon their leaves

By cattle plunging from the steepy brink

While water flowers more than their share recieve

And revel to their very cups in drink

Just like the world some strive and fare but ill

While others riot and have plenty still’

John Clare’s An Idle Hour was written during his well-documented Helpston Period. This was the time he spent writing passionately about nature and the landscape until his declining mental health got the better of him and he moved out of the village for Northborough in 1832. Five years later he would be sent to an asylum.

Clare’s poetic observations from this period are deeply relevant to this day, so keenly aware was he of the damage caused by the Enclosure Acts which saw the aggressive destruction of much of what he, the ‘peasant poet’ treasured. Clare observed the beginning of the slow death of the rural communities in England and the subsequent carving up of the countryside in which wealth took no prisoners.

I have always felt a deep connection to this poem, the countryside is the perfect place to pause a while and reflect and ask nature to help you make sense of it all. Clare got it and perhaps that proved the undoing of him.