Timeline
John Clare - Remembrances, published 1908 (written c.1832)
This poem is an elegy, a sustained complaint on the loss of Clare's place of birth and childhood. It is natural and spontaneous in feeling, yet carefully controlled by metre and rhyme.
It works on two levels: Firstly, the universal one of loss of joy and childhood with the coming of painful self-consciousness and awareness; Secondly, the specific, material, historical one of irretrievable loss of place, of common land, trees, tradition, familiarity, memory, with the coming of the freedom-ending, desert-levelling "never weary plough".
In striking images towards the end, the "axe" of class "self-interest" spoils, and "Inclosure like a Buonaparte" builds a new Empire for the powerful.