Clare begins with a question and keeps asking it. "And what is Life?" sounds like something from a catechism, and the poem answers in the same brisk way: an hour-glass, a mist, a dream. The definitions arrive so quickly that none can settle, which is part of the point. Life here cannot be held still long enough to examine. Its length is "a minute's pause, a moment's thought," and happiness is "a bubble on the stream, / That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought." The central idea is that earthly existence is brief, disappointing and full of unexplained suffering, and that its only meaning is as a "trial" preparing us for happiness in heaven.
John Clare is best known for poems rooted in the countryside, and that habit of close looking shows even in this abstract meditation. The images are small, natural and fragile: mist burning off in sunlight, dew on a lawn, a cobweb. The second stanza is the most inventive. Hope is a "puffing gale of morn" that strips the dew, the "gem" of each "floweret," and then simply "dies." Hope, in other words, ruins the very beauty it seemed to promise. Then the picture changes to a cobweb "hiding disappointment's thorn," and the thorn "stings more keenly through the thin disguise." A covering that thin should fool no one, yet it does. Notice that "disguise" returns when life is finally "stripped of its disguise." The poem is an unmasking, and the same word begins and ends it.
The form is deliberately uneven. The stanzas run to six, five, nine, five and eight lines, and long lines alternate with short, indented ones. The rhyme scheme never settles either. The opening couplet (run/sun) loosens into dream/stream and thought/nought, as if the pattern can't be trusted to hold. The third stanza, addressed to "O Trouble," is where the structure wobbles most. The speaker tries to reason: if trouble's "bounty" flows so "free and liberal," there must be "some necessary cause." Calling suffering a bounty is bitterly ironic, and the lines shrink and stumble as the logic fails: "What need requireth thee," "Devoted wretches feel." The stanza ends with no answer, only "Fate's unbroken seal," like a sealed letter nobody is allowed to open. You can almost hear a mind circling a problem it cannot solve.
Death gets a similarly mixed treatment. It has a "dark, mysterious name of horrid sound," yet it is also "a long and lingering sleep, the weary crave." Fear and longing sit side by side. Peace is found "No where at all, save heaven, and the grave," and the way "the grave" trails after "heaven" like an afterthought suggests how close the two have become for a tired speaker.
In the last stanza the question comes back, now as "Then what is Life?", but the answer is an argument, not an image. The word "vain" has been building throughout: "vain Hopes," life's "vanity," "vain man." It means both empty and conceited, so humans are blamed for their own blindness, with "foolish eyes" and "unthankful" hearts. Listen also to the rhymes: disguise, eyes, prize, skies. One sound is repeated four times, and the stanza locks into place around it. "Skies" ends up rhymed with the faulty eyes and the disguise, as if heaven were the cure for how we see.
The poem's significance lies partly in the gap between its comfort and its evidence. The consolation, that life is a lesson to teach us to value joy we will only receive in the skies, is conventional, and phrases like "unthankful mortals" sound close to a sermon. But the bubble, the dew and the cobweb are far more vivid than the promise they lead to. Five stanzas of loss outweigh two lines of heaven. A reader can accept the doctrine and still feel that the poem's real strength is how well it makes impermanence visible, using the smallest and most easily broken things to ask the largest question there is.