Remembering distinguished Jamaicans – John Ebenezer Clare McFarlane

John Ebenezer Clare McFarlane, known as Clare McFarlane, was a distinguished civil servant and poet. He was Jamaica’s first financial secretary and second Poet Laureate after Thomas McDermot (Tom Redcam).

McFarlane was born in Spanish Town, St Catherine, on December 12, 1894, to Charles Samuel McFarlane and his wife, Imogene Spence. His father was a teacher. Clare was tutored during his primary years, and after, attended Cornwall College. On completing his secondary education, he entered the colonial civil service in 1913. He married Amy Hall Livingstone, a teacher, in 1917. They had seven children. He was a Methodist.

In his civil service career, McFarlane held several posts and rose through the ranks from clerk at the Registrar General’s Department, moving to the Island Treasury, where he would be promoted to accountant general (1949-53) and financial secretary (1953-54).

He was a noted poet and helped to establish the Poetry League of Jamaica in 1923. In 1931, he participated in a University of London Summer Course in English Language and Literature. He produced several books of poetry as follows: Beatrice (1918); Poems (1922 &1924); Sex and Christianity (1932); Jamaica’s Crisis (1937); The Challenge of our Times (1945); and The Magdalene: the Story of Supreme Love (1950).

He also edited anthologies of poetry - Summerland: Anthology of Jamaican Poetry (1929) and a Treasury of Jamaican Poetry (1950).

McFarlane was invested as Jamaica’s Poet Laureate on April 7, 1953. He was awarded the Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Silver Medal in 1935 and the Gold Medal in 1958. He died at the University College Hospital on October 13, 1962, two months after Jamaica became an independent country.

The Poet’s Corner at Hope Gardens was established by Clare McFarlane in December 1953. In March 1963, members of the P.E.N. Club and the Poetry League gathered to pay tribute to him and read his poem, On National Vanities, which was published in The Gleaner on March 17, 1963:

Slowly we learn; the oft repeated line

Linger a little moment and is gone;

Nation on nation follows sun on sun

With empire’ dust, fate builds her great design,

But we are blind and see not in our pride,

We strain towards the petrifying mound

To sit above our fellows, and we ride

The slow and luckless toiler to the ground

Fools are we for our pains; whom we despise,

Last come, shall mount our withered vanities

Top most to sit upon the vast decay

Of time and temporal things – for, last or first,

The proud array of pictured bubbles burst,

Mirages of their glory pass away.

(Typed from the 1963 Gleaner text)

I admit to not knowing who McFarlane was, and I studied literature in English and West Indian literature at high school and at university. J.E. Clare McFarlane’s papers and works are at the National Library. Perhaps the Institute of Jamaica, the National Library, and the Social Development Commission could publish some of his poems and restore the works of Clare McFarlane to known, recited, and studied Jamaican literature.

– Marcia Thomas