: 27 March 2002 :

As a break from work, I watched Predator tonight. Well, I missed the start, but I think I managed to follow the plot pretty well.

When not watching large Austrians charging around smeared with mud, I've been reading John Clare. Clare's great. His best poetry's got a real directness and simplicity to it, and he uses all these dialect words and nonstandard spellings. The best one is “jockolate” for chocolate. “Jockolate” looks much better, I think, although it does suggest some kind of Scottish theme which I'm sure Clare didn't really intend.

He ended up in a mental asylum in the last years of his life, and went through a phrase of thinking he was Lord Byron, his contemporary. Byron was a bestseller while Clare was largely overlooked. It all gets pretty harrowing.

His poetry's more widely read now than it was, which is good, though he still gets nowhere near as much critical coverage as other poets of the period like Shelley and Keats. His prose is really good as well, whether he's being descriptive (he's got an amazing naturalist's eye) or when he's getting cross about things:

“Pastoral poems are full of nothing but the old thread bare epithets of ‘sweet singing cuckoo’ ‘love lorn nightingale’ ‘fond turtles’ ‘sparkling brooks’ ‘green meadows’ ‘leafy woods’ etc etc these make up the creation of Pastoral and descriptive poesy and every thing else is reckond low and vulgar”

Take that, pastoral poets.

I went food shopping today, too. My eye was caught by a 3 for 2 offer on jelly, and I haven't had jelly for ages, so I thought it might be fun to make some. They only had three flavours though, raspberry and strawberry and orange, and I wanted something a bit more exciting. Like lime. I didn't get any in the end, but I might do some other time.

“And if it be as hopes portray
Then will thy smiles like dews of heaven
Cheer my lone walks my toils repay
And all I ask be given”