A grasshopper is hardly a heavy creature, yet in these six lines it bends whole plants to the ground. That small paradox drives John Clare's "Grasshoppers". The poem follows an insect across a patch of meadow, leap by leap, and measures its progress by how the grass responds. Nothing is explained or turned into a lesson. Clare watches closely and asks us to do the same.
The poem is built as a sequence, almost like notes jotted down as the action happens. "And now" the insects cling to sow-grass, and "Next" one springs to the cat-tail-grass. Between them, the plants form a scale of resistance. The sow-grass "shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight", so it wobbles and holds. The oxeye "doubles", folding under the load. The last grass bends "until they touch the ground". Each plant gives way a little more than the one before, and the second jump is a "farther bound". The poem builds toward its final word, "ground", where the energy of the leap runs out.
Clare's word choices give the scene its texture. "Thumming" is a striking way to describe a spring. I take it as a blend of thumping and humming, which makes the jump both a physical knock and a sound. "Swees" looks like a dialect cousin of "sways", and its hissing sound mimics a stem swinging back and forth. The third line is also the slowest in the poem. The commas, the semicolon and the run of one-syllable words ("shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight") make us feel the stalk shudder before it settles. The next line, with "arching oxeye doubles", moves into longer, curving sounds that suit a stem folding over.
The form is three rhyming couplets in a steady ten-syllable line. English poets often used this pattern for large, formal subjects, and Clare uses it for an insect on a stalk. The effect is gentle rather than mocking, as though the grasshopper's small drama deserves the same careful attention. The rhymes also pair cause with effect. "Spring" and "cling" join take-off and grip. "Straight" and "weight" set the upright stalk against the load that tests it. "Bound" and "ground" link the leap to its result, the grass pressed flat.
The grammar stays loose, as it might in speech. The poem begins with plural "Grasshoppers", narrows to a single "he", and ends with "they touch the ground". That last "they" could mean the bending grass tops or drift back to the insects. It is also unclear whether "his weight" belongs to the oxeye or the grasshopper. I read it as the insect's, which sharpens the surprise that so little weight can do so much. Either way, the blurring suits a moment when the eye jumps from one hopper to the next.
The plant names, "sow-grass", "oxeye", "cat-tail-grass", matter too. Clare grew up in rural Northamptonshire and is remembered as a poet of the English countryside, and here the specific, local vocabulary keeps the scene from becoming a vague picture of "nature". We are placed at stem level among particular plants, not looking at a landscape from a distance.
The poem's significance lies in this kind of attention. It is tiny, and it ends without a moral or a neat conclusion, with the grass bent and the grasshopper's next move left unseen. Its pleasure is in noticing that a creature almost without weight can still bow a stalk to the earth. Once you have read it, a field looks like a place where small events are constantly happening.