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At the age of 40, John Clare’s movement from Helpston to Northborough meant two different meanings for him: fortunately, his new home had a small field attached to it to make him independent, but to be independent and out of his old one was to exchange his knowledge for a way of life quite unknown. In Northborough, he wrote elegies about leaving home and feeling nostalgia of home. “Remembrances”(1832) is concerned with his changing attitude to Helpston, and contains the sense that the associations he has with it are with a place that disappeared with the Enclosure. It has the protests of a distressed and dejected poet against the destruction of his personal identity, which is located in this now changed rural setting. “The Flitting”(1832) is about homesickness and the crisis that is caused by severing the ties with home. To him, ‘flitting’ refers to the action of moving house, but also implies an inconstant, fleeing movement, and can be read as linking directly to the central theme of instability. Both “Remembrances” and “The Flitting” contain the nostalgia of home by the sense of estrangement. Here, a home symbolizes the stability and constancy like Helpston and the memory of his childhood.