Clough gives the opening of this poem to a speaker who is plainly an enemy of the crowd he describes. The voice is scornful and establishment-minded, baffled that so many people are streaming toward a Galilean preacher. The poem never names Jesus. It calls him "a young man preaching in a boat" and lets the Gospel story show through the gaps. Its central idea is an irony: the more the speaker tries to cut this figure down to size, the more clearly his words show why people followed him.
The first twenty lines are brisk rhymed couplets of eight syllables, a jaunty, nursery-rhyme movement that suits mockery. The geography sweeps outward, "across the sea, along the shore," "the valley through, the mountain down," while "numbers more and ever more" lets us feel the crowd swelling. Then comes the deflation. The speaker asks what these people went out to see, and the answer shrinks to "the reed that in the wind doth shake" and "the weed that washes in the lake." The phrase about the reed echoes a question Jesus himself asks about John the Baptist in Matthew's Gospel, but here it is turned into an insult. The crowd has gone out to stare at weeds. Even the sounds are dismissive: "reeds that waver, the weeds that float" is a flimsy little tongue-twister, and it runs straight into the plain, bathetic answer, "A young man preaching in a boat." Boat is a humble word, with no temple, throne or marble in it.
That line becomes a refrain. When it returns at the end of the first section, it rhymes with "note" instead of "float," so the same deflating phrase now closes a different question. The speaker tells the crowd to go instead to "those who sit in Moses' seat," the "perfect doctors of the law" in "great Jerusalem." The phrase "Moses' seat" comes from the Gospels' language about the religious authorities. Clough fills the passage with false deference ("Go humbly seek, and bow to them"), and the repeated, slightly pompous adjectives "great" and "perfect" make the praise sound hollow. Even the archaic "ye," "doth" and "hath" help. They give the speaker a stiff, superior tone, as if he were reading out a verdict.
At the line "A prophet! Boys and women weak!" the poem changes shape. The couplets give way to quatrains that alternate four stresses with three, a ballad-like pattern, and the rhymes now interlock (weak/speak, rave/gave). The change is audible: the jaunty chant breaks off and the speaker turns angry. He addresses his audience as "boys and women weak," which is meant as a put-down, and he demands they "Declare, or cease to rave." The questions come fast: "Whence is it he hath learned to speak? / Say, who his doctrine gave?" The speaker assumes that real teaching has to come with credentials, and that a man without a school or office can have nothing to say.
The final four lines show how the poem is built. "He teacheth with authority, / And not as do the Scribes" is almost word for word what the Gospel says of Jesus' hearers. It is hard to tell whether the speaker is still sneering or has been forced into an admission. Either way, the answer to "Who his doctrine gave?" is that his teaching carries its own weight, the thing that learned officials lacked. The rhyme of "tribes" with "Scribes" ends the poem with a sharp, almost clinical click, and it names the institution the speaker has been defending. The crowd's "silly" instinct has turned out to be the sound one.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in twenty-eight lines. It is a kind of dramatic monologue in the voice of the opposition, and the irony only works because the reader knows the Gospel passages being reworked. The poem takes a familiar story and makes it strange by telling it through a sceptic's eyes. The reader's sympathy shifts, line by line, from the speaker's elegant contempt to the plain figure in the boat. Clough also lets the quiet refrain carry the argument. By the end, "a young man preaching in a boat" no longer sounds like an insult.