Background to the poem

This sonnet, sometimes known as ‘The Mouse’s Nest’, was written in the 1830s by a poet who was distinctly unusual. Unlike many of the highly educated, financially secure poets of the time, John Clare was a farm labourer. He is sometimes described as the ‘peasant poet’.

What do you notice about the way Clare describes what he stumbles across and the language he uses? This is a sonnet, but how does the structure differ from that of a conventional sonnet?

John Keats said that Clare’s poetry had too much description in it and not enough ‘sentiment’. Clare responded by suggesting that city‑dwelling poets such as Keats had an unrealistic or fanciful vision of nature. Is there anything about this sonnet that makes you feel that the poet is immersed in the countryside he is describing? Notice how Clare does not attempt to draw a moral at the end of the poem. There is no real sense of the incident having an impact upon the poet. It is as if he is observing and recording, then moving on to the next scene.

About John Clare

John Clare was a farm labourer who was largely self-educated. He was deeply affected by the Enclosure Act of 1801, when common land was fenced off, halting farming by the general populace, and wrote movingly about the uprooting of trees and hedges and the loss of common land, which changed a centuries-old way of life.

In 1820, Clare’s first collection of poems was published. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery proved extremely popular, and Clare was briefly adopted by fashionable London society. However, subsequent volumes were not successful, as fashions changed and the novelty of reading the work of a ‘peasant poet’ wore off. Clare became increasingly delusional, distressed by the failure of his literary ambitions and the devastation caused by enclosure.

He spent the last twenty­‑three years of his life in the Northampton county asylum, where he produced some remarkable, tormented visionary poems, such as ‘I Am’.

Read more about John Clare in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography