SOURCE: “John Clare's ‘Child Harold’: A Polyphonic Reading,” in Criticism, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 139-57.

In the following essay, Pearce reads the “many voices” in Clare's “Child Harold” and analyzes the text “as a site of interaction between a number of independent voices and its subsequent resistance to closure.”

Then he the tennant of the hall & Cot The princely palace too hath been his home & Gipsey's camp where friends would know him not In midst of wealth a beggar still to roam Parted from one whose heart was once his home 

(“Child Harold”, Later Poems, 1, p. 62)

John Clare's “Child Harold” is a poem of many voices. One of the original manuscript versions (Northampton MS 6) is physically divided into a series of discrete stanza-song units by a system of line-divisions, and the above quotation indicates just some of the identities that the personal pronoun assumes in its picaresque...