The Poignant Story of Jack Clemo, the Deaf and Blind Cornish Poet

The deaf and blind poet Jack Clemo was born in 1916 in the beautiful county of Cornwall. His father, Reginald, was killed at sea in the First World War and he was raised by his mother Eveline who was a committed Christian. Eveline cried out to God that He would help her bring up Jack without a husband and a father. She was often close to despair as she observed her son’s struggles with blindness and deafness but she held on to God.

In her excellent biography Clemo: A Love Story, Sally Magnusson describes Eveline’s faith in these harrowing circumstances: “One day, in an agony of spirit, I went to my bedroom and, taking my Bible in my hand, I knelt by my bedside praying to God for light in the darkness. Opening my Bible, and casting my eyes on the page, the first words I read were “Fear not”. These two words gripped me and, as I continued to read, I received an unforgettable promise.”

Eveline had to make ends meet on a small widow’s pension, supplemented by Jack’s orphan’s pension. Money was very tight but God answered her prayers and she never wavered in her faith.

As a young lad Jack would wander over the empty, rusting clay pits in his home in Goonamarris, near St Austell. During his childhood he experienced pain and discomfort in his eyes and he was forced to wear bandages for weeks on end. Living in this darkness was simply awful for young Jack. At the age of 19 Jack became stone deaf. He would spend many hours crying as he brooded on the social isolation that deafness brought him.

Through all these painful ordeals Jack began to seek God and in his book The Invading Gospel he outlined his conversion to the Christian faith. He was very clear that the pantheist view of God repelled him. Pantheists believe that God is everything and, of course, you are also a god. To call God, the ‘Infinite One’ or the ‘Cosmic Consciousness’ was blasphemy to Clemo. Jack believed in the grand biblical story of a good creation, battered and bruised by human sin and rebellion but the Creator and Saviour of the world Jesus Christ has arrived to destroy death, forgive sins and make all things new.

In 1945 he came in from a stroll around the local clayworks and began to craft his powerful and moving poem ‘Christ in the Clay-pit’.

Why should I find him here

And not in a church, nor yet

Where Nature heaves a breast like Olivet

Against the stars? I peer

Upon His footsteps in this quarried mud;

I see his blood

In rusty stains on pit-props, wagon frames

Bristling with nails, not leaves. There were no leaves

Upon his chosen Tree,

No parasitic flowering over shames

Of Eden’s primal infidelity.

This is brilliant Christian poetry. It evokes poignant biblical themes in the coin of the rugged Cornish claypits. Clemo’s poems are rich in biblical allusiveness, evoking the biblical narrative in remarkable ways. He wrote this: “Truth came down from the scaffold, walked out of the tomb and ate fish.”

Clemo also published novels. In 1948 Wilding Graft won him an Atlantic Award in Literature from Birmingham University. This also came with a prize of £100 that delighted the cash-strapped Eveline. The prestigious New York Times praised Jack’s poetic musings on the Cornish clayscape.

In 1955 things took a turn for the worse when Jack became permanently blind. Despite all these set backs Clemo was convinced that he would eventually marry. Unlike the  pagan pantheist he believed in divine providence. In 1967 an admirer of his poetry, Ruth Peaty wrote him a letter and a moving romance unfolded. They were married in 1968 and this made Jack very happy. He believed passionately that God had promised him a Christian wife and friend. He died in Weymouth, Dorset in 1994.

Why is Christian poetry important? Without doubt there are some Christians who would pour cold water upon this often ignored vocation. Surely Clemo should have dedicated his life and energies to evangelism or social action. This mindset reveals a lack of insight into the cultural mandate and the goodness of creation. The gospel is not only about the forgiveness of sins; vital though this is. In Jesus Christ we are restored to image God faithfully and we are called to take up the many callings that our God delights in. Without the poetry of gifted believers like Jack Clemo our lives are impoverished and denuded.

Just ponder the dark, pessimistic musings of the atheist poet Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985). In his brilliant poem Aubade he plumbs the depths of atheist misery and unbelief.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

For Larkin there is no God. No bodily resurrection. No hope for the broken creation. Jesus was just a strange, unknown, itinerant moral teacher. Larkin mocks and sneers at the Christian faith with vim and vigour. For Larkin there is just the terrible certainty of meaningless, brutal oblivion and its concomitant despair. Eloquent? Yes.

If we marinate exclusively in the poems of unbelieving wordsmiths like Philip Larkin we will absorb their dangerously tragic beliefs and our lives can become stunted, impoverished and in thrall to secular myths and commitments. Christian poetry can feed our inner lives…our souls…suggesting not preaching, alluding not stating, whispering not shouting. Christian poetry is one of the many ways that humans can respond faithfully to the creation mandate. Didn’t Adam craft a poem for Eve?

Let us thank God for the deaf, blind poet Jack Clemo who evoked the Christian faith in so many wonderful and fascinating ways.

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Mark Roques

Mark taught Philosophy and Religious Education at Prior Park College, Bath, for many years. As Director of RealityBites he has developed a rich range of resources for youth workers and teachers. He has spoken at conferences in the UK, Holland, South Korea, Spain, Australia and New Zealand.

Mark is a lively storyteller and the author of four books, including The Spy, the Rat and the Bed of Nails: Creative Ways of Talking about Christian Faith. His work is focused on storytelling and how this can help us to communicate the Christian faith. He has written many articles for the Baptist Times, RE Today, Youthscape, Direction magazine and the Christian Teachers Journal.

Latest posts by Mark Roques (see all)

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