The Peasant Poet vs. The Self-Proclaimed Poet of the Peasants

Both I am and Tintern Abbey are self-conscious and inwardly-turned poems. Both have an element of contemplation and nostalgia, and both suddenly redirect themselves beyond the mid-point of the poem toward close companions. The primary difference is the effect of these feelings on each maturing poet respectively.

Tintern Abbey is a poem which treats the maturity of Wordsworth from a young poet who "The sounding cataract haunted...like a passion;" to an older poet who now hears "The still, sad music of humanity." Wordsworth reflects off of nature to gain insight into his own soul. When he reaches out of himself he seems to find stable and lasting companionship in the countryside he knows. Likewise, when he feels suddenly the need to reach out to a fellow human being and turns to Dorothy for what seems to be an affirmation of sorts, he meets a willing mirror who is right there by his side and in whom he is able to see his young self.

Poor John Clare on the other hand, rejected by the literary circle and stuck in a crazy house, is unable to find any such affirmation. He had grown up in the countryside and had had a similar connection to nature as Wordsworth when younger. However, rejected by critics and friends alike, he is adrift in "the nothingness of scorn and noise" and can find no lasting solace in the natural world. He relates to it not until the very end of I am, and then not directly. Instead, he refers to the feelings he once felt: "untroubled where I lie, the grass below ­ above the vaulted sky." But he no longer feels like it is a place on earth, nor feelings attainable on earth. He writes:

I long for scenes where man has never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God;

He is yearning for the next level, shunned by the world he lives in now. To make things substantially worse, when he turns to his friends in the poem, he finds them unapproachable: "Even the dearest, that I love the best Are strange ­ nay, rather stranger than the rest." He had started the poem with a declaration of aloneness in the world, acutely aware that his "friends forsake [him] like a memory lost." And when he turns toward those that had been the dearest to him, finds their strangeness to be the strangest of them all.

John Clare, who had been elevated by the literary circle from peasant to poet, had little weight left to fall back on when deprived of his VIP pass. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was born and bred within the same class that were the primary readers of poetry. He had a tight circle of support from colleagues he had grown up with and was much more capable of contending with the shifting trends and opinions in criticism.

Matt Smaus