In John Clare's sonnet, morning arrives as a sound before it arrives as a sight. The speaker is awake in the dark of a winter day, and the first sign of dawn is not light but a ploughman's singing: "Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met / Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky." The sky is still empty, and twilight is only "a doubt as yet." The poem's central idea comes near the end: "O happiness, how simple is thy track." Happiness here is no grand event. It is something you can follow, found in a man doing his work before anyone is watching.
Clare builds the scene from small personifications, each with its own temperament. Dawn is a woman who has not yet shown "her sleeve of grey," so there is nothing "to know her bye," nothing to recognise her by. The owls are almost comic: they "might have hallooed if they durst," like night-watchmen too timid to challenge an intruder. Joy is the liveliest figure, "up and whistled bye," a passer-by on the road with a tune in its mouth. Against all this, the speaker's own claim is gently deflated. He "thought that first / In winter time of all the world was I," and the little word "I" sits at the end of the line, pleased with itself, until the ploughman's song arrives to correct him.
The middle of the poem turns on memory. The speaker knows a "merry tune" but cannot "wake it back." That verb echoes "Woke" and "arose" from earlier, so waking becomes a quiet running theme: the speaker wakes, joy is already up, a memory needs rousing, and soon the sky will be roused too. It takes the ploughman to do it, who "changed it to the song." The move from "tune" to "song" matters, because a tune is only a shape, while a song has words and a singer. The labourer hands back something the speaker half owned, which suggests, though the poem never says so, a stock of music shared among people who work and walk the same land.
Formally, the poem is a sonnet in iambic pentameter that sounds more like talk than recitation. The rhymes run *abab cbcb dede ff*, so one sound, the "-y" of "sky," "bye," "I," "bye," runs through the whole first eight lines. Clare even repeats "bye" itself, once meaning "by which" and once meaning "passed by." The octave seems to hum on a single note, much like a half-remembered tune. The rhymes change in the third quatrain, just as the song is found, and its last line, the aphorism about happiness, lands on "track." It is a well-chosen word. The sky has shown no "footstep," but happiness leaves a path you can walk, and, judging by the ploughing setting, perhaps a furrow as well.
A dash then opens the couplet, and daylight finally comes in. The east's "young brow" is "tinged like the willow shoots," a colour borrowed from the hedgerow rather than a painter's palette, and it "Glows red and finds thee singing at the plough." The grammar reverses the expected order. Dawn does not wake the worker; it turns up late and finds happiness already busy. The poem ends on "plough," and its rhyme with "brow" fastens the sky's face to the labourer's tool.
Clare worked on the land himself before he became a published poet, and the poem never treats its ploughman as a pretty detail in a view. The ploughman is the poem's source of light, and its answer to where happiness lives: in the habit of early work and in a song everyone half knows, not in the scenery. That claim is modest and precisely observed, and it is why the sonnet rewards a second reading.