‘The Broken Crutch’: Bloomfield and Narrative, by Hugh Underhill.

I want to begin by quoting John Goodridge in his essay ‘”Now Wenches, Listen, and Let Lovers Lie”: Women’s Storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare’. ‘Clare and Bloomfield,’ he says, ‘focus on women’s skills as story-tellers able to command an audience, construct and dramatise a story, control pace and timing, character and speech, humour and pathos.’ [1]  In fact, a considerable proportion of Bloomfield’s work takes narrative form of one kind or another. Even The Farmer’s Boy could be said to be a version of narrative, the ur-narrative of the seasons, embedded in story-telling since agricultural communities began. And Bloomfield provides numerous anecdotal incidents within that enveloping narrative of the seasons.

A form of narrative which exerted a fascination for the eighteenth century was that of the ‘Life’. One thinks immediately of Johnson’s Lives of the , as well as Boswell’s monumental, and seminal, Life of Johnson, and William Mason’s Life of Gray (the same William Mason quoted by Bloomfield in ‘Nature’s Music’). These had been anticipated in the seventeenth century by Izaac Walton’s Lives which included lives of Donne and Herbert. The ‘Life’, like the seasons, is a kind of universal narrative: birth, childhood, maturity, death are common to all. Alisdair Macintyre has written of ‘a narrative concept of selfhood’ which took hold in the eighteenth century. ‘I am what I may be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death.’ (After Virtue: a study in moral theory. London: 1981, p. 202). It seems to have become felt that to write a life was to confer and affirm, as it were, an identity, to make sense of a life. (I’ll recur to this point shortly.) Bloomfield’s contemporary the poet laureate Robert Southey was author of several lives, most pertinently, Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets. [2]  John Clare, of course, had proposed to write a biography of Bloomfield himself, though this was never accomplished. But it was an important matter to him: by writing Bloomfield’s life he could have legitimized a new kind of poetic identity, that of the individual of humble origins whose talent and achievement puts him on an equal footing with poets of more privileged background.

Bloomfield’s books sold after his death included works, among others, by Goldsmith, Gray, Pope, Milton, Cowper and Sterne, so he had exposure to plenty of written narrative. George Crabbe, also Bloomfield’s contemporary, was to seize upon the notion of the short story in verse which dramatizes key rites of passage in characters’ lives and develop it to a new sophistication. I know of no evidence that Crabbe read Bloomfield, but there seems to me a direct affinity. Their use of the narrative couplet, for example, has striking resemblances. However, I think the major source of Bloomfield’s interest in narrative is in a rural oral tradition, the telling of stories in a largely pre-literate rural community. The gossip and yarn-spinning to which Bloomfield in his boyhood must many times have sat and listened are vigorously and artfully reshaped in his own tales.

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Just as with writing a ‘life’, there is an implicit assumption that to impose on existence a story-structure, to construct it as a formal narrative, is to make a kind of sense of it. Narrative implies the ‘arc’ of a story, a beginning, a middle and an end, the assembling of a series of connections which appear to make that overall sense (though what may be categorized in a general way as ‘postmodern’ narrative makes it its business to subvert that). What kind of sense of things, then, was Bloomfield concerned to establish? In part, perhaps, he unconsciously sought to retrieve poetry from a distancing of art from social life under the pressures of industrial and agricultural capitalism, a separation which became much accentuated as the romantic movement ran its course. Social life – the kindly intercourse which holds families and communities as well as the different orders of society together in reciprocally beneficial relationships – was what was meaningful for Bloomfield, and social life essentially involves a series of narratives, of which Bloomfield gives us fertile examples (the night ‘the ancient Dame’ of Fakenham fancied she was pursued by a ghost, the day the elderly couple Richard and Kate went to the fair, the chequered progress of Walter and Jane’s love and its slightly fairy-tale happy ending, the tales told by country folk in May Day with the Muses, and so on.) And since the social life that he knew was that by and large of the labouring and artisan classes, a dignifying of labour and the poor was intrinsic to his narrative project. Bloomfield did wish to be seen as a poet of equal status with the educated poets, those very poets who were instrumental in maintaining the discrimination between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘polite’. But if this looks like a contradiction, or perhaps better to say, a strain or tension in his work (and his life), it is in fact one, it seems to me, that he never permitted to affect his steadiness of vision. ‘Let labour have its due!’, he says at the end of ‘Summer’, and I think that throughout his writing he is driven for all his unwillingness to openly endorse any radical position [3]  by his knowledge that labour did not get its due, and by an acute sense of the nexus between ‘Gain’ (l.62) and the depredations wrought by an aggressive capitalism – ‘This scythe of desolation call’d “Reform”‘, as he refers to it in this poem (1. 68) – upon the rural environment and rural communities as he had experienced them in his youth.

I’m sure he knew that struggle and confrontation were unavoidable in the real world in which he was writing. But I think that it was for him a sustaining imaginative-moral act to bear testimony to, and dramatically affirm, a cluster of values he felt had been lost. Above all, that meant the avoidance of conflict, because what had been lost – or so he felt, rightly or wrongly – was a community living in harmony. I would suggest that this is the overarching narrative, if I may put it so, of his entire poetical enterprise.

‘The Broken Crutch. A Tale’ presents itself precisely as a narrative which embodies this overarching narrative and those tensions between a conservative visioning of the social contract and a potentially radical re-visioning of it. It takes an ideal both of domestic relations – the solicitude of Peggy’s father and uncle for her welfare, her love and consideration for them – and of relations between the classes allowing a wealthy farmer to dispense hospitality to all and to take a humble servant-girl for his wife, and sets them against forms of violence and conflict threatening those ideals. The characters in the tale are at first sight, perhaps, stock figures: the brothers John and Gilbert Meldrum, the upright father and uncle protecting the family honour (‘nor bring the Meldrums into shame’ 1.14), Peggy the uncorrupted country girl (1.32), ‘Young Herbert Brooks’ looking suspiciously like the conventional libertine (at ll.35 ff., in fact, there is a lively characterization of precisely that conventional libertine). But as always in Bloomfield the freshness of presentation means that we experience the conventions as directly felt, the people as if known at first hand by the narrator. Country life and people are by no means, in their detailed presentation, either naively idealized, or morally generalized.

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Peggy goes off as a servant to the young squire Herbert’s mansion armed with her father’s admonitions, despite which she is wooed and won by Herbert, and I want to take up the Tale at the point where she writes to her uncle with the news of the marriage proposal.

Here, the narrative drama embodies Bloomfield’s perception of the way persons of the labouring class were confined and contained, if I may put it in this slightly complicated way, by a constructed state of consciousness. However fair the signs, the matching of social unequals is taken to be ‘out of bounds’, something unquestionable. This is a state of consciousness which here not only disallows the possibility of breaking out of their station, but equally disallows that full reciprocity between the classes which Bloomfield cherishes. These are tensions which Bloomfield sets about making his story dramatically and poetically enact. Up to this point, the pace of the narrative has been mostly even and leisurely, but now the verse-movement becomes hurried and agitated, the emphases more strident. At 1.167 (‘Rous’d was…’) the strongly inverted first foot gives a sense of action, of urgency (it’s an old trick in the management of iambics, but I think it fair to say Bloomfield is a master of it), ‘E’en lameness’ is a spondee giving strong emphasis, the alliterative echo of ‘Rous’d’ and ‘rose’ pushes the lines onward. These effects intensify at 1. 176 with the stressed first syllables of the lines, the repetition of ‘Go’, the heavy accents:

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The father’s disability is dramatically offset by his active, virile brother. This sudden violent incident, the breaking of the crutch, on which the whole tale turns, is at once comic and dramatic: John’s burst of angry energy contrasts so abruptly with his ‘halting’ walk and the pain his lameness causes him. (The tale gathers a certain poignancy from our knowledge that Bloomfield’s own eldest son, as he tells his readers in the Dedication to Wild Flowers where the tale appeared, was lame). Bloomfield’s is not an idealizing vision; these characters are very human. As we see when, in the heat of the moment, Gilbert proposes, extraordinarily, an act of socially insubordinate violence. The description of his mutterings as ‘rebellious’ (1. 186) is, surely, considered and deliberate.

His impetuosity is given in the rapidity of the verse, in the stress on ‘enormous’, in the assonance of ‘o’, the alliteration of ‘b’ and ‘f’: there is a flailing, whirling movement:

How useful that elision ‘o’er’ is: ‘over’ would impede this onward impetus. Gilbert rushes on so, that he becomes breathless (ll. 191-2). Then comes this masterly piece of narrative deferral, the ‘stooping grandame’, contrastingly, and, we shall see, critically, slow-moving, of whom he asks the news. The old woman herself has a story to tell and wants to spin it out. Not a good idea in Bloomfield’s countryside, if you’re in a hurry, to enquire about news. ‘But let me rest’ she says at line 195. Rest was not so easily come by: what better recourse for half-an­-hour or so’s break as well as the ritual bonding of labouring-dass people than the spinning-out of a yarn? At line 205 she insists on being given time to tell her tale out: ‘Aye, but have patience, man!’ It is, of course, the lack of patience, the lack of giving thought – we’re told at line 245 that Gilbert acts ‘without thought or dread’ – that threatens to dislocate the social harmony. But Gilbert once again loses patience, for which he is duly reproved. Older women are often a steadying influence in Bloomfield’s narratives, though you could say that at the same time she is provoking: this is another humanly unidealized character with her snuff­box and winding around the point. She’s in a long tradition, Chaucer or Shakespeare could have written her, or Crabbe in Bloomfield’s own time (perhaps more acidly).

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The cow-boy Gilbert next questions is as frustrating in his way as the grandame. He can’t come to the point either, relishing the goings-on and merriment at the Hall but unable to give clear information. So Gilbert presses on. He arrives at the Hall, not only hospitably welcoming as ever, but evidently prepared for a great celebration; he refreshes himself with ale, but has no appetite to eat (line 233). Following the rush of his journey there are a few moments of stillness, but moments in which Gilbert is beset by agitation, anxieties and perplexity. The tension is broken with a lovely image:

and Gilbert starts into impetuous action again – ‘without thought or dread, The broad oak stair-case thunder’d with his tread’ (lines 245-6) – his thundering movement delicately contrasted by the bridal party – ‘Light tript the party’. Gilbert’s unmannered and peremptory accosting of Peggy – ‘Now are you married, Peggy, yes or no?’ – is mildly reproached by Herbert: ‘you’re too rough this time’ (l. 259).

The tale is at this point given a new turn with information which has been held back till now (the gift for narrative timing): the serving-man Nathan had been sent early in the morning to bring Peggy’s father to the wedding, but had been delayed as a result of some celebratory over-indulgence. But this suspending of the action is once more broken as Nathan arrives with John Meldrum at this crucial moment. Peggy clings ‘like a dewy woodbine’ (line 290) round her father’s neck, and at last Gilbert comes ‘off his guard’ (line 291). His newly relaxed, generous movement – he ‘Loos’d the one loop that held his coat before,’ (line 293) – is given in that inverted foot and echoing ‘Loos’d … loop’, but yet again he acts without thought: with a noisy spondee, ‘Down thumpt the broken crutch upon the floor!’

This triggers a renewed narrative push, for now the reason for the broken crutch must be explained and misunderstandings sorted out. Gilbert is caught between his honest and natural impulses and his class-consciousness. He makes plain his rebellious intention, but even in doing so betrays himself trapped by the insidious psychology of power-relationships: ‘With this same cudgel … / An’ please you, Sir, I meant to knock you down’ (lines 321-2). The guardedness and ambiguity of that standard deference – ‘An’ please you, Sir …’ – slipped into this forthright declaration is at once comic and shocking. (Unless we read ‘An’ please you, Sir,’ as sarcastic, which I don’t think it possibly can be.) But as Bloomfield wrote in his Preface to Rural Tales, his poems treat of ‘village manners’, of supportive relationships within families, of the natural good-heartedness of these country people, the mutually beneficial relationships holding a community together. Such right feeling is what motivates Gilbert for all his roughness, and is not the preserve of the more socially refined. Herbert proceeds to eulogize Peggy for her possession of ‘nature’s untaught grace’, and the poem’s penultimate line, spoken by lame John Meldrum, has it that ‘Nature will speak, aye, just as Nature feels’. At the same time, Herbert has importantly acknowledged that there need be no social barriers if true feeling is not distorted by pride: he disdains ‘pride’s unfeeling claims’, we are told at 1. 154. It must be said that Bloomfield seems generally at ease with the notion of deference to social superiors where the social contract is properly upheld by them. The essential thrust, though, is a wanting to circumvent the inevitably uneasy relationships between the classes.

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But there are tensions here which the poem exposes as not so readily resolvable. Bloomfield is tapping a kind of collective structure of feeling among rural communities. Herbert is what the social superior ought to be or can in some instances be; Bloomfield knows that selfishness, greed and pride are not vices confined to the gentry, and that the simple virtue imputed to Peggy is not universal among ordinary country folk. He knows that the celebratory account of social harmony which occupies the final 16 lines of his poem does not represent an actual state of affairs, and probably that it never had despite his ‘Remembrance’ of a kinder state of affairs. He wants to show good-heartedness and natural feeling going back and forth between the classes, that to be ‘brave good gentlemen’ is not the preserve of one class. But the italicized line-and-a­ half spoken by John Meldrum shortly before the poem’s conclusion

are isolated and stressed precisely because that is how it should be but is not: they are not just a forlorn plea, but in effect a protest. The tale’s energy, its buoyancy and onward narrative thrust, are generated by the way a socially transgressive act of violence is incipient in the action throughout; in an uneasy balance between what the poet refers to in himself as ‘warmth’ (1. 76), that is, resentment at the way ‘This scythe of desolation called Reform’ is a violation from above of the social contract, and a desire to dramatize the avoidance of violent confrontation. Abjuring cynicism or bitterness, Bloomfield everywhere wills his set of values in the face of what he knows to be a changed world – and acknowledges to be so by setting his tale in a kind of ‘fairy land’ (1. 60) of the past, its ‘melancholy fall’ emblematized by the felled trees and burnt-down mansion of ll. 57-90. Shifting everything into a vanished past is no more than a device for getting his values dramatized. But the stand he takes is, I think, if not an expression of political radicalism, one of what might be called moral radicalism. [4]  Indeed, there is a kind of coded engagement of this moral radicalism with political actualities whether Bloomfield would have willed it or not, because his acquaintance at first hand with what it means for labour not to get its due enforces the connections even if without making them explicit. [5] 

There are recurrent suggestions in his work that given that his world has changed, which at one level he accepts, he sanctions the desire for social mobility which was in fact one of the driving forces of those changes, and that when he pleads for labour to have its due, he is investing in a different order of social contract, one in which labour has rights, rather than depending upon the ‘kindness’ and practice of social responsibility implicit in an outmoded social contract.

Thus, contrary to that view of Bloomfield’s ‘artlessness’ which many of his admirers appear to have held, the apparent simplicity, even naivety, of a narrative such as ‘The Broken Crutch’ belies its sophisticated deployment of narrative resources, its skilful manipulation of the reader’s responses, and the complex eddies of thought and feeling which it dramatizes.

Notes

[1]The John Clare Society Journal, 22 (July 2003). BACK

[2] ‘I do not introduce Robert Bloomfield here,’ Southey wrote, ‘because his poems are worthy of preservation separately, and in general collections; and because it is my intention one day to manifest at more length my respect for one whose talents were of no common standard, and whose character was of a man whose name was at one time so deservedly popular, should have been past [sic]in poverty, and perhaps shortened by distress, that distress having been brought on by no misconduct or imprudence of his own.’ It is perhaps worth noting that in common with the attitudes of his time, Southey feels he cannot let Bloomfield’s talents, despite his ‘respect’ for them, stand on their own, but must add a ritual commendation of his ‘character’. The story of a life invariably had to involve an exemplary moral narrative. However, Southey never wrote his Life of Bloomfield. BACK

[3] In a correspondence of May 1804 Bloomfield told the radical bookseller Clio Rickman that he had ‘made a determination to be neutral in Politicks and Religion’ and that he ‘must and will be as private a Man as pastoral poetry will permit me’. See Newsletter No. 4 (July 2002). BACK

[4] This phrase is used by Clare MacDonald Shaw (ed. John Goodridge, The Independent Spirit: The John Clare Society and The Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994, p. 90) in discussing women poets read by John Clare. BACK

[5] As I’ve argued elsewhere, it is a direct acquaintance which most of the canonical poets of more privileged social origins could not have. BACK