Composer’s Note:

Asylum Piece is a setting of a text by nineteenth century British poet John Clare, who spent a good deal of his life in an insane asylum.

As a child, he would spend hours writing rhymes on scraps of paper, usually hiding them from his father, a farm laborer who saw no purpose in his son’s daydreaming. Indeed, hardly anyone saw purpose in Clare’s life. He had one brief critical success in 1820 with his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, but the attention was short lived, and his next and last collection was virtually ignored by the press and public alike.

He began drinking, addressing his wife by the name of a casual acquaintance long since dead, and attempting (unsuccessfully) to sell his poems door-to-door, often walking as much as thirty miles in a day. In 1837, Clare was committed to a private asylum. He was later moved to Northampton County Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1864, and where he wrote the poem set here.