YORE SHOES

John Clare was a poet in the Victorian times. These are his well worn shoes. He was nicknamed 'the peasant poet' and was commited to a private asylum in 1837. He escaped the asylum and walked all the way home only to find his girlfriend had sadly passed away. He was admited again in 1841 to a different asylum but he would take long walks and write poetry in the countryside whilst he was there. John loved the country and saw a lot of change to the countryside he loved throughout the industrial boom in the Victorian times. In the Victorian times there was little full understanding of mental problems and these hospitals were very lonely and frustrating places... so putting on these shoes  to go outside probably would have meant a lot to John. This year, 2014, is the 150th Anniversary of his death. Children in England still study his poems in school every year. I wonder if in the Victorian times, sitting in a mental aslyum, ordinary man John Clare could have imagined that his humble and simple shoes would end up in a museum one day...

 

 

This is one of John's Poems.

 

The schoolboys still their morning ramble take
To neighboring village school with playing speed,
Loitering with passtime's leisure till they quake,
Oft looking up the wild-geese droves to heed,
Watching the letters which their journeys make;
Or plucking haws on which their fieldfares feed,
And hips and sloes; and on each shallow lake
Making glib slides, where they like shadows go
Till some fresh passtimes in their minds awake.
Then off they start anew and hasty blow
Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow;
Then races with their shadows wildly run
That stride huge giants o'er the shining snow
In the pale splendour of the winter sun.