Like Sir Walter Scott, John Clare (1793–1864) was a straddler of eras. Unlike Scott, however — who was anchored in Romanticism while pointing to the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites — Clare was a poetic outlier: the sole occupant of his own peculiar sphere. His poem “A Look at the Heavens,” which ran as the Sun’s Poem of the Day last June, renarrates Psalm 19 as a personal experience of what Wordsworth would have called the Sublime. Clare (no revolutionary, but a devout and orthodox Anglican) simply called it God.

Today’s poem, again, envisions an upheaval in the natural world as an experience of biblical proportions. We can readily imagine how, to the sensitive Clare, a storm at night would be an exercise in sensory overwhelm. The woods would seem to be “sobbing,” the rain to bring bad tidings of things to come. Twice the poem uses the word “deluge,” calling to mind the obliterating flood of Genesis. In the moment, the storm’s human observers — the cotter, the “fearing dame,” and the speaker himself — half-persuade themselves that God might forget his promise to Noah. 

In this whole long, single pentameter stanza, where many lines begin with the hammer-stroke of a trochee as if to echo a burst of wind or the lashings of the rain, the strangest moment occurs at line ten — where, in the chaos of the storm, language itself turns strange. Though “glabber” is a Scots word for liquefied mud, we seem to be indoors around a fire, with “flaze” apparently signifying gazing at the fire — the people talking until a frightened woman hushes them to listen to the storm’s ferocity. Only when the wind has blown itself out, and the end of the world hasn’t happened, can anyone go to bed. 

Nightwind 
by John Clare 
 
Darkness like midnight from the sobbing woods 
Clamours with dismal tidings of the rain, 
Roaring as rivers breaking loose in floods 
To spread and foam and deluge all the plain. 
The cotter listens at his door again, 
Half doubting whether it be floods or wind, 
And through the thickening darkness looks afraid, 
Thinking of roads that travel has to find 
Through night’s black depths in danger’s garb arrayed. 
And the loud glabber round the flaze soon stops 
When hushed to silence by the lifted hand 
Of fearing dame who hears the noise in dread 
And thinks a deluge comes to drown the land; 
Nor dares she go to bed until the tempest drops.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.