Cut off to a large degree from his family, he passed a somewhat solitary boyhood, devoted to the school and to early literary efforts in the Rugby Magazine.

Here his contemporaries included Benjamin Jowett, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, John Campbell Shairp, William George Ward and Frederick Temple.

In 1849, he witnessed another revolution, the siege of the Roman Republic, which inspired another long poem, Amours de Voyage (reprinted by Persephone Books in 2009).

[5] He married Miss Shore Smith and pursued a steady official career, diversified only by an appointment in 1856 as secretary to a commission sent to study foreign military education.

Despite his fragile health, this Continental tour renewed a state of euphoria like that of 1848–49, and he quickly wrote the elements of his last long poem, Mari Magno.

[6] He is buried in the English Cemetery there, in a tomb that his wife and sister had Susan Horner design from Jean-François Champollion's book on Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Amours de Voyage, a novel in verse, was written at Rome in 1849; Dipsychus, a rather amorphous satire, at Venice in 1850; and the idylls which make up Mari Magno, or Tales on Board, in 1861.

Anthony Kenny notes that the editions prepared by Clough's widow, Blanche, have "been criticized ... for omitting, in the interests of propriety, significant passages in Dipsychus and other poems."

[14] His work is interesting to students of meter, owing to the experiments which he made, in the Bothie and elsewhere, with English hexameters and other types of verse formed upon classical models.

Other short poems include "Through a Glass Darkly", an exploration of Christian faith and doubt, and "The Latest Decalogue", a satirical take on the Ten Commandments.

Clough himself gives no indication that the couplet on murder might refer to the medical profession in general or to the treatment of the terminally ill in particular; indeed, the entire text of "The Latest Decalogue" satirizes the hypocrisy, materialism, the selective ethics and self-interest common to all of mankind.

This bitter judgement of humanity should be balanced against the more compassionate view he displays in other poems such as "Through A Glass Darkly": "Ah yet when all is thought and said, the heart still overrules the head; still what we hope we must believe, and what is given us receive".