John Clare's Stroll In The Country Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Dark the clouds in the troubled sky
Dark the sigh of the windswept trees
Dark the terrified thoughts that fly
Through a mind adrift in a soul's unease

White the moonlight on leafy boughs
White the owl in its deadly swoop
Whiter still, the furrowed brow
Of John Clare fleeing from Bedlam's coop

Cold the fields that he stumbled past
Cold his bed in the bare hayrick
Cold his death in misfortune's blast
John Clare, poet and lunatic.