"Wood Pictures in Spring," John Clare

The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold
When spring's young sunshine bathes their trunks in gold,
So rich, so beautiful, so past the power
Of words to paint--my heart aches for the dower
The pencil gives to soften and infuse
This brown luxuriance of unfolding hues,
This living luscious tinting woodlands give
Into a landscape that might breathe and live,
And this old gate that claps against the tree
The entrance of spring's paradise should be--
Yet paint itself with living nature fails:
The sunshine threading through these broken rails
In mellow shades no pencil e'er conveys,
And mind alone feels fancies and portrays.

From "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare.

Clare (1793-1864) was highly regarded as one of the best nature poets in the English Romantic movement; a recent biography by Jonathan Clare (who also edited I Am) restresses his working class origins. The RC Blog did a good job of rounding up some Clare links when Bates' biography was published last fall, including a review by John Lanchester in the New Yorker. But here, too, is Christopher Caldwell for Slate and Terrence Rafferty for NYTBR.

The John Clare Society does what it can to promote his work. And then there's John Ashbery's "For John Clare."