399. John Clare to Joseph Weston, 7 March 1825
399. John Clare to Joseph Weston, 7 March 1825*
Helpstone March 7. 1825
Dear Sir
In answer to yours of the third I am sorry to say that I posses but little of the corespondence of my departed 'brother bard' what I do posses you are welcome too & as to my letters to him you may do with them just as you please & make what use of them you like
I deeply regret that ill health prevented our corespondence & that death prevented us from being better acquainted I sincerely loved the man & admired his Genius & had a strong anxiety to make a journey to spend a day with him on my second visit to London & I intended to have stopt at Biggleswade on my return home for that purpose but my purse got too near the bottom for a stoppage on the road & as it was too great a distance to walk home this with other matters prevented me from seeing him as one of my family was very ill at the same time & hastened my return—Whatever cause his friends may have to regret the death of the Poet—Fame is not one [of] them for he dyed ripe for immortality & had he written nothing else but 'Richard & Kate' [1] that fine picture of Rural Life were sufficient to establish his name as the English Theocritus & the first of rural Bards in this country & as Fashion (that feeble substitute for Fame) had nothing to do in his exaltation its neglect will have nothing to affect his memory it is built on a more solid foundation & time will bring its own reward to the 'Farmers Boy'—I beg you will have the kindness to take care of the M.S. & return it when you have done with it as I wish to preserve a scrap of his handwriting—the Copy on the other side is a note which accompanied his present of 'Mayday with the Muses' I gave the origional to Allan Cunningham the Poet [2] who has a high respect for Bloomfields genius & whose request on that account to posses a scrap of his writing) I was proud & happy to gratifye—soon after the Poets death I wrote in a mellancholy feeling 3 Sonnets to his memory.
I was not aware that his 'Remains' woud have had such insertions or I shoud have sent them to his daughter—I shall fill this sheet with them for your perusal tho I expect they will come out in the Volume now in the press that will be published this Spring: with my best wishes that your kindly labours for the memory of the departed Poet may meet with the success it deserves
I remain yours very faithfully
Three Sonnets on Bloomfield
1.
2.
3.
Address: Jos Weston Esqr / 12 Providence Row / Finsbury Square / London / March 8t
[2] Clare wrote to this effect on 9 September 1824 to his friend Cunningham, the labouring-class rural poet. See The Letters of John Clare, ed. Mark Storey (Oxford, 1985), pp. 321–24. For Bloomfield's note to Clare, see Letter 359 of the present edition. BACK
[3] Mark Storey, the editor of The Letters of John Clare (Oxford, 1985), notes (p. 322) that Weston, with a view to publishing the sonnets, asked Clare, in a letter of 20 April, to make some alterations. Clare noted in his journal for 30 April 'I shall not agree with either way Editors are troubled with nice amendings & if Doctors were as fond of Amputation as they are of altering & correcting the world woud have nothing but cripples'. Storey notes further that the sonnets appeared in The Scientific Receptacle, 1 (1825), 306–7, with variants. The second was included in Clare's collection The Rural Muse (London, 1835). All three are in his Midsummer Cushion manuscript collection. BACK
