The graves of those we loved, How beautiful they lie; From every care and strife removed; Beneath heavens canopy. ‘The Churchyard’, John Clare
IT was a family affair, a gathering of my wife’s clan, and the route took us within a couple of miles of Helpston. So, not for the first time, and probably not for the last, I visited John Clare’s grave. Not quite a pilgrimage, but a paying of respects, because we can never pay our dues to Clare, the one true voice of Nature from the English countryside (). It spoke through him, he was its tribune., where the bird, after it ‘winnows the air’ (a perfect threshing image of its beating wings), does ‘drop agen/To nests upon the ground, which anything/May come atto destroy’.
