The Poetry of Friendship: Robert Bloomfield, John Clare, and the Labouring-Class Tradition, by Tim Burke

To read Bloomfield’s poems is to enter a world strikingly unconcerned with friendship and sociability. Addresses to, descriptions of, or narratives about friends are not readily found in his published works, and friendship as an abstract principle is hardly ever invoked.

Although the title of Bloomfield’s 1802 collection, Rural Tales, would seem to imply both a set of social bonds and some type of communal gathering at which such tales might be rehearsed, sociability appears to be occasional rather than permanent, habitual, or framed in legal terms (such as marriage). The ‘Winter Song’ tells of a gathering of ‘neighbours’ rather than friends, and the friendships of ‘Richard and Kate’ and ‘Walter and Jane’ are coloured by the inequalities of power within the marital relationship (however happy the parties may declare themselves to be). Social gatherings also tend to be organised rather than spontaneous in the poems in Wild Flowers, Bloomfield’s next collection (1806). ‘The Broken Crutch’ is set around a wedding feast and ‘The Horkey’ around the rhythms of the work performed in the fields. Far more common in Bloomfield are poems characterised by the pain of friendlessness and/or the memory of friendships that have ended. Such disappointments afflict the young and the old alike: the plight of the Miller’s Maid is intensified because she has ‘no parents, and no friends beside’, while the old French Mariner recalls the dear friends lost in combat: ‘I’ve rode o’er many a dreadful wave, / I’ve seen the reeking blood descend, / I’ve heard the last groans of the brave, / The shipmate dear, the steady friend’. For some of Bloomfield’s speakers, objects become a substitute for human friends: in ‘The Widow to her Hour Glass’, we see a widow trying desperately to fill the hours of the day after the loss of a husband, and talking, pathetically, to an hour-glass: ‘Come friend, I’ll turn thee up again: / Companion of my lonely hour.’ Less plaintively, Bloomfield himself would later open his poem ‘To my Old Oak Table’ by hailing the table on which he had composed The Farmer’s Boy (1800) as ‘Friend of my peaceful days! Substantial friend’: for this ‘honest friend’, he recalls a time of great woes when ‘Resignation was my dearest friend’.

The Farmer’s Boy is Bloomfield’s most extended, and most intense, exploration of friendlessness. In ‘Spring’, Giles performs ‘unheeded drudgery’, and is compared to a solitary ox rather than to the lambs who ‘frisk’ with their ‘playmates’. ‘Summer’ is for him a time of ‘lonely ease’, when ‘solitude derives peculiar charms’ though this statement is curiously placed shortly before the account of the harvest revels. The limited social experience of Giles is largely confined to these harvest festivities, or to family gatherings (at which there are ‘kindred pleasures’ and ‘bond[s] of amity’). A description of sporting boys in ‘Autumn’ does not seem to include Giles as a participant in the games, which are only mentioned within a meditation upon ‘departed friends’. From this meditation, the speaker moves directly to consider ‘Ill-fated Ann’, the solitary madwoman who spends her days sat upon ‘some tufted molehill’ and ‘there weeps her life away’. Although elsewhere in ‘Autumn’, ‘Euston’s Fitzroy’, that is, Bloomfield’s patron the Duke of Grafton, is counted as the ‘poor man’s friend’, this can be no more a friendship between equals than that between Bloomfield and Thomas Lloyd Baker and Robert Bransby Cooper, who paid for their favourite poet to join them on a tour of the Wye Valley in 1807 (an act which secures them the title of ‘friends’ in the resultant poem, The Banks of Wye). In any case, the reference to Grafton is undercut because it follows shortly after the poem’s most striking image of Giles’s friendlessness: ‘To duty’s call he yields, / And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields’. This ‘Crusoe’ is not entirely content in his isolation, however, since in this heart-rending passage, he gathers fruit and builds a fire for friends that do not arrive at the appointed time, and who are, we are led to suspect, no more than imaginary companions:

... o’er the flame the sputt’ring fruit he rests,
Placing green sods to seat the coming guests;
His guests by promise; playmates young and gay: –
But Ah! fresh pastimes lure their steps away!
He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain
Till feeling Disappointment’s cruel pain,
His fairy revels are exchang’d for rage,
His banquet marr’d, grown dull his hermitage.
The field becomes his prison, till on high
Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.
Midst air, health, daylight, can he prisoner be?
If fields are prisons, where is Liberty?

Giles is here given an education in romantic philosophy: he must learn, early in his life, that nature is a more than adequate compensation for friendship, and the imagination a greater consolation to the self than social life.

John Clare, for one, learned from Bloomfield that friendlessness as a poetic idea and image could serve as an effective shorthand for announcing one’s creative genius. His poem ‘The Fate of Genius’ is especially adept in deploying this strategy. Clare looks forward and back, both fantasising that one day his ‘rustic genius’ might emerge from ‘darkness’, and lamenting, after the event, the betrayal of the ‘learned friends’ who once championed him. He imagines one of his Helpston contemporaries, now employed as a clerk, cashing in on his intimate knowledge of the newly-discovered poet: ‘“I knew him from a child” the clerk would say, / “And often noticed his dislike to play / Oft met him then lone left by woods and streams … Nor did his habits alter with his age … Nor friends nor labour woud his thoughts beguile / Still dumb he seemd in company and toil …”‘. In Clare’s poem, as sometimes happens in Bloomfield’s verse, objects prove to be more faithful friends than people: ‘Hed fancy friends in every thing he found’.

In the decades in which Bloomfield and Clare flourished, literary loneliness was a thoroughly conventional performance, of course. Friendlessness was a popular concept in the fiction of the period: in the gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe and her contemporaries, ‘friendless’ is the preferred adjective of abducted or abandoned heroines who wish for protection. The term is often used in a similar sense by Bloomfield’s fellow labouring-class poets too, especially those who could not find a patron, or found themselves abandoned by their one-time protectors. John Frederick Bryant, a Bristol pipe-maker who published his Verses in 1787, described himself as a ‘friendless’ genius whose problems would be solved ‘would some gen’rous patronising friend / My murth’ring woes and dire vexations end’. Ann Yearsley, another Bristol poet, similarly conflates the terms ‘friend’ and ‘patron’ in describing her short-lived association with Hannah More. Most important, however, for an understanding of why Clare and Bloomfield cultivated a poetic universe without friends, is that long-enduring notion of the Romantic poet as a type of the Blakean prophet, or the Wordsworthian visionary, speaking alone from the top of some mountain or moor, or from the isolated position of one who is not at home in the flux of the city. Keats in his premature sickness, and Coleridge in his opium-fuelled journeys into the imagination, are also key contributors to the romantic mythology of the poet as one capable of transcending all worldly concerns. Labouring-class poets of this time certainly found that their patrons and reviewers were eager to describe them as solitary figures, in part so that their discoveries would fulfil the philosophical criteria of ‘natural’ or ‘original’ genius. This theory, developed in the middle and later eighteenth century, insisted upon the uneducated author as a specialised and isolated personality, granted creative inspiration by nature or God. No labouring-class poet was more attracted to sociability as an ideal and as a practice than Robert Burns, yet much of the early iconography of Burns suppressed this aspect of his work: Wordsworth depicted him, in his poem ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802), as a more laborious version of his own poetic personality, in other words, as a solitary who ‘walked in glory and in joy, / Behind his plough, upon the mountainside’.

No doubt, labouring-class poets themselves were sometimes happy to live up to this image, and thus collaborated in their own mythologisation. But the tendency of scholars and critics to abstract these ‘peasant poets’ from the communities in which they flourished (a project begun by Robert Southey, in his Lives and Works of our Uneducated Poets, in 1831) has ultimately resulted in a misunderstanding of the labouring-class literary tradition. That tradition is both broader and deeper than is customarily assumed, principally because many of the poets who did not fulfil the pattern of the friendless solitary were jettisoned by literary historians from Southey onwards. If Edward Williams, Janet Little, Edward Rushton and Elizabeth Hands, to name but four such poets, are allowed to take their rightful place alongside Bloomfield and Clare as the most important labouring-class writers of the Romantic period, we might come to a new and fuller understanding of the tradition, and Romanticism generally, as populated not only by solitaries and visionaries, but by poets who cherished and celebrated sociability and communal life, and who invented ways of incorporating these ideals into the form as well as the content of their verse. A more thorough investigation of the labouring-class poetic tradition at the beginning of the nineteenth century also reveals that Bloomfield the man was nothing like so friendless or solitary as his published work might suggest. Anyone who has read Bloomfield’s many letters to and from his friends, a great number of which are held at the British Library in London, will already know this (though one could not guess it from the rather partial selection of his correspondence edited by W. H. Hart in 1870 [reprinted in 1968], which tends to perpetuate rather than call into question the conventional portrait of a solipsistic Bloomfield).

II

In the course of my research for a recently-published anthology of labouring-class poetry, I chanced upon an obscure author who wrote several poems about his great friendship with Bloomfield. Like Bloomfield, William Lane originated from the lower orders of society; he worked variously as a paper maker, tavern waiter and pastry seller. Born in 1744 in Wycombe, Bucks, he was more than twenty years older than Bloomfield, but as the following poem (published in 1806) reveals, this did not prevent Lane feeling a deep attachment to his fellow poet, whose talent he recognised as superior to his own, and whose friendship he valued deeply:

On Mr B————d’s Indulging the Author with his Company,
from his own House to Hackney, in the Fine Autumn of 1805

...Sweet breath’d the breezes o’er the verdant lawn;
The Summer’s sultry heats were all withdrawn;
Sol gave his beams so sober, soft and clear,
And in the balance poiz’d the equal year.
Nor trees bereft of verdure, still their shade
Was welcome oft, and salutary made.
With transient chirp, the finches flitted by;
And larks melodious echo’d from the sky;
Linnets assembled in a tuneful throng,
Congratulate each other in their song.
The ardour which had occupy’d their breast
In former months, now calmly sooth’d to rest;
Complacency resum’d her sober reign,
And satisfaction thrill’d thro’ ev’ry vein:
Pleas’d, that their infant train could cleave the sky,
And independant raise their plumes on high:
Affection sweet, their instinct still retain’d,
And in their bosoms calm composure reign’d:
Each recogniz’d his loving, toiling mate,
And all the pleasing incidents relate,
Attendant on the recent blissful scene –
Connubial bush, or grove, or flow’ry green.

...The thrush and blackbird occupy the spray,
And chaunting, welcome the meridian ray;
While distant objects lend their kindest aid,
Diverse, with hill and dale, and light and shade,
And field and grove – the streamlets murm’ring tone;
These beauties thine, sweet nature! all thine own!

...Her handmaid art, her feebler aid employs –
Her fairest, strongest, grandest efforts tries,
To grace the scene, and all her charms display;
(Predictive of the sweet auspicious day)
The spires ascending thro’ the lofty trees;
With aspects varying with the varying breeze.
Augusta’s turrets rising on the right;
And Shooter’s antique tower appears in sight,
Which soon detach’d from yonder lofty hill,
Will shine more famous by poetic skill!

...But all of art, or nature’s boundless stores,
With each in ceaseless, rich abundance pours,
Give but a transient gust, a sudden glance,
Incapable to fill the vast expanse,
That swells within the space of human thought,
With friendship’s, or poetic fervour fraught;
That for emancipation pants to tell
That certain something indescribable!

...Did Collins’ parts, or Bloomfield’s pow’rs possess
My scanty bosom, then I would express
In more emphatic, more exalted strains,
All the enthusiastic breast contains –
In glowing diction, then would I rehearse,
The sweets of friendship, and the charms of verse.

...But cease frail muse – the faint detail suspend;
Here is the Man, the Poet and the Friend!
His condescension confidence commands;
He with a lib’ral heart, and out-stretch’d hands,
Revives the weakest, meanest of the throng,
That ever try’d to tell his thoughts in song.
With kind communications, mild and clear,
He warms the heart and captivates the ear;
The Friend advises and the Poet sings,
Soft as Favonius waves his balmy wings.

...By Nature’s aid he reach’d Parnassian height,
Nor waited erudition’s tardy flight.
But Ah! I fail Parnassian heights to soar,
Nor can my feeble optics e’er explore,
Where Bloomfield’s native pow’rs his efforts lift,
To pluck the laurel from the topmost cliff!
Nor these excite his vanity or pride;
He chooses down the humble vale to glide!
Like some smooth current, gentle, deep, and clear –
Nor can his sympathetic heart forbear,
To share the sorrows of a suff’ring friend;
And with him down the gloomy vale descend;
Where mutual tales, and corresponding sighs
Press out the briny moisture of the eyes.
But while sweet sympathy extracts the tear,
Some brighter, softer, sweeter scenes appear; –
Interpositions of kind Providence,
Needful supplies – timely deliverance,
With friendly counsel and benevolence!
While each applies the soft, the sov’reign balm,
Sweet resignation – placid, meek and calm;
Sees cheering bounties, and the chast’ning rod,
Alike proclaim a wise and gracious God!

...Congratulations close the solemn scene;
While friendship glows in each poetic vein.

III

The published verse of John Clare and Robert Bloomfield suggests that the possession of a genius for verse and a thirst for literary society tends, moreover, to isolate one from one’s peers: Clare’s poetic persona, like Bloomfield’s Giles in The Farmer’s Boy, finds friendships difficult to forge and sustain.

The joys and difficulties of friendship also concerned William Lane, a poet who worked in a variety of trades, most often as a paper-maker, in both Buckinghamshire and London. His career as a published poet (between 1792 and 1827) situates him close to Bloomfield, though more than twenty years in age separated them (Lane was born in 1744). Lane’s poem ‘On Mr B———d’s Indulging the Author with his Company, from his own House to Hackney, in the Fine Autumn of 1805’ (published in 1806) reveals that this did not prevent Lane feeling a deep attachment to the younger poet, whose talent he recognised as superior to his own, and whose friendship he valued deeply.

Lane’s poem opens with a hymn to the sights and sounds of the landscape beyond London’s city limits, focusing in particular on the linnets who sing to ‘congratulate each other’:

Linnets assembled in a tuneful throng,
Congratulate each other in their song.
The ardour which had occupy’d their breast
In former months, now calmly sooth’d to rest;
Each recogniz’d his loving, toiling mate,
And all the pleasing incidents relate ...

The poem ends by using the same vocabulary to cement Lane’s poetic friendship with Bloomfield: ‘Congratulations close the solemn scene; / While friendship glows in each poetic vein.’ Friendship, like poetic fervour, is ‘something indescribable!’, Lane claims, similarly ‘Incapable to fill the vast expanse, / That swells within the space of human thought’. At times in the poem, Bloomfield is treated with a species of reverence, and is even invested with a Christ-like ability to raise struggling poets, like Lane himself, from oblivion:

His condescension confidence commands;
He with a lib’ral heart, and out-stretch’d hands,
Revives the weakest, meanest of the throng,
That ever try’d to tell his thoughts in song. ...
The Friend advises and the Poet sings,
Soft as Favonius waves his balmy wings.

Unfortunately, we know nothing of Bloomfield’s feelings in return; if the poets corresponded, as seems likely, then none of their letters have survived. Bloomfield nowhere makes mention of Lane or his work, but it is not difficult to fathom how the friendship might have been sustained, since the two men had much in common beyond their labouring-class origins; both write extensively on the landscapes of their native regions, both were great admirers of Robert Burns, both were careful in their published writings to treat political themes – in which both were greatly interested – in only the most oblique ways. (In his autobiography, Fourscore Years of the Life of William Lane, Written by Himself, published in 1825, Lane recalled that an early poetic attempt was dismissed by a potential, unnamed patron as too radical, the work of a ‘Peter Petulant’. It is at this late stage in his career that this radical identity is first acknowledged, and he alludes to a large body of unpublished work, which takes ‘Peter Petulant’ as its nom-de-plume, though this has not survived.)

The friendship did not last. In two of his late poems, Lane’s reverential flatteries have disappeared or been redeployed for ironic purposes. ‘On Mount Parnassus’ (1822), strongly implies that Bloomfield’s work lacked Parnassian inspiration, and in a long poem titled ‘Solomon’ (1819) Lane appears to be responding to a perceived slight; at any rate, the references to Bloomfield as ‘friend’ and to his ‘gen’rous heart’ in the following extract have a pained and bitter irony.

Here B——m——d comes! well Bobby where’s your clue?
Sure there can be little left for you!
Did you not know your brother Burns had been
And mercilessly stript each rural scene,
Of field and fold, of cottage, grove and green?
Has diligently pick’d up every scrap
That lay unnotic’d in dame Nature’s lap?
Thus Denham, Pope and Thomson, Cowper, Burns,
They all have made their choice & serv’d their turns.
And where those nobler geniuses have been,
Sure little can remain for us to glean.
‘Us, us!’ methinks I hear my friend reply,
‘I did not know we claim’d affinity!’
Well, if I’ve claim’d somewhat beyond my due,
Sure, 'tis an honour to be kin to you!
And tho’ there is a great disparity;
Yet in some things, perhaps, we both agree;
Some family resemblance we retain;
We both are poor; but I am poor and vain!
But sure you’ll say, ‘there’s trifling enough;
I wish no more of that ungenial stuff.’
Dear friend, forbear; I have no ill intent,
I have not yet express’d the whole I meant:
Tho’ lit’rally, like me, you may be poor,
You much abound in intellectual store.
And were it possible, you would impart
(I know the feelings of your gen’rous heart)
Most gladly aught essential to my good;
And add to favours formerly bestow’d,
And much increase my debt of gratitude.
Tho’ great the portion, that falls to your share,
You modestly will say, I’ve nought to spare.
Some snarling critic says, ‘You’ll find enough,
We know you only deal in common stuff!’
Well friend, however small and mean my lot,
I’d wish with care, to husband what I’ve got.
My high-born, boasting brethren of the quill
Say, public good, excites, commands their skill!
I frankly must confess I write for gain,
‘Poor Man!’ you’ll say, ‘I fear your hopes are vain.’

Most telling of all, perhaps, is the absence of a single reference to Bloomfield in Lane’s autobiography, which appeared in 1825, the year after Bloomfield’s death. This is particularly surprising because Lane makes a compelling argument for labouring-class poets to be considered as a distinct school, though he condemns those who leave behind their fellow plebeians and aspire instead to the precincts of higher society: ‘We poor aspirants, of the plebeian tribe, are exposed to many disadvantages, not having attained that propriety of deportment and consistency of conduct acquired by education, self­ knowledge, habit, and experience; and frequently, by aiming to be something more than we ought to be, we render ourselves less than we might have been.’ Bloomfield perhaps was among those who, in Lane’s imagination, had aimed to be something more than he ‘ought’ to be. Perhaps only the discovery of some surviving correspondence will unravel the mystery of the friendship and falling­ out of Bloomfield and Lane.