John Clare was an English contemporary of Keats, Byron and Shelley. Unlike these three worthies of the Romantic tradition, and despite being well-known in his lifetime, he fell into relative obscurity in the 19th century. His reputation as a major poet was restored in the 20th century through the clamouring of poets like Edmund Blunden, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.

Clare had only a basic education and spent much of his time as a poor farm labourer, but his verse is extraordinary, revealing a prodigious talent. He wrote as he rambled in his native Northamptonshire, writing powerfully of the natural world and his sense of alienation as the enclosure of land set in. He also wrote some fine love poetry, such as the one below. It probably helps to know that the Mary in the poem was a woman he met as a young man, fell in love with, but could not marry because of a parental veto. Such was life back then for a peasant poet.

To Mary: It is the evening hour.

It is the evening hour,
How silent all doth lie:
The horned moon she shows her face
In the river with the sky.
Just by the path on which we pass,
The flaggy lake lies still as glass.

Spirit of her I love,
Whispering to me
Stories of sweet visions as I rove,
Here stop, and crop with me
Sweet flowers that in the still hour grew,
We'll take them home, nor shake off the bright dew.

Mary, or sweet spirit of thee,
As the bright sun shines to-morrow
Thy dark eyes these flowers shall see,
Gathered by me in sorrow,
Into the still hour when my mind was free
To walk alone--yet wish I walked with thee.