In course of time it was found expedient not to allow him to wander
beyond the Asylum grounds. He wrote occasionally to his son Charles,
but appears never to have been visited by either relatives or
friends. The neglect of his wife and children is inexplicable. It was
no doubt while smarting under this treatment that he penned the lines
given below, of which an eloquent critic has said that "in their
sublime sadness and incoherence they sum up, with marvellous effect,
the one great misfortune of the poet's life--his mental isolation--
his inability to make his deepest character and thoughts intelligible
to others. They read like the wail of a nature cut off from all
access to other minds, concentrated at its own centre, and conscious
of the impassable gulf which separates it from universal humanity:"--
I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me, like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am--I live--though I am toss'd
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise.
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange--nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod--
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept--
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.
Clare's physical powers slowly declined, and at length he had to be
wheeled about the Asylum grounds in a Bath chair. As he felt his end
approaching he would frequently say "I have lived too long," or "I
want to go home." Until within three days of his death he managed to
reach his favourite seat in the window, but was then seized with
paralysis, and on the afternoon of the 20th of May, 1864, without a
struggle or a sigh his spirit passed away. He was taken home.
In accordance with Clare's own wish, his remains were interred in the
churchyard at Helpstone, by the side of those of his father and
mother, under the shade of a sycamore tree. The expenses of the
funeral were paid by the Hon. G. W. Fitzwilliam. Two or three years
afterwards a coped monument of Ketton stone was erected over Clare's
remains. It bears this inscription:--
"Sacred to the Memory of John Clare, the Northamptonshire Peasant
Poet. Born July 13, 1793. Died May 20th, 1864. A Poet is born, not
made."
In 1869, another memorial was erected in the principal street of
Helpstone. The style is Early English, and it bears suitable
inscriptions from Clare's Works.