A walker with a free Sunday wanders into a gipsy camp, as he has many times before. As a boy he paid the fortune-teller a coin and heard glittering promises. As a man he no longer believes her, and she answers with a furious curse. John Clare, a poet rooted in the English countryside, turns this small scene into a study of how belief is bought, how it is lost, and how an idle coin can start to feel like a bet on one's soul.
The poem is written in rhyming couplets of ten-syllable lines, a steady, almost chatty rhythm that suits a speaker telling an old story. Clare lets the sentences spill over the line-ends. In "Along the greensward uniformly pricks / Her pliant bending hazel's arching sticks," the verb is held back until the end of the first line, and the sense runs straight into the rhyme. We watch the woman push hazel rods into the turf to make a shelter. The detail is exact and unromantic. The camp is tucked behind a "round-topt bush" or a "briar-entangled hedge" with "flag-leaves" and "ramping sedge" below, and its purpose is to keep off "the bothering bustle of the wind." The woman is introduced as "the real effigy of midnight hags," with "tawny smoked flesh" and "tattered rags." The speaker's vocabulary comes from outside her world, and "gibberish" and "quaintly" are condescending words. Yet the details of her work are respectful in their way. She is practical and skilled at making a home from hedge and hazel.
The fortune-telling scene is where the poem's humour and its unease start to mix. The woman is an "old Sybil," a name borrowed from ancient prophetesses, but she "forged her boding clack," and "forged" suggests both hammering out and faking. The twin children "bawling at her back" are called imps, which undercuts any mystery. The money matters more than the magic. The coin is "struck" on the boy's palm, and the "hoping chink" is the sound of a bargain. The boy's hopes "agree" with his fear of losing "the fortune's fee," so the wish and the worry sit side by side. Then comes the sharpest joke: "Squire and Lord were purchased with a groat." A groat was a fourpenny coin, so the prophecy of high rank costs almost nothing. The line is mocking, but it also shows how a poor boy might long for a different place in the world.
Everything turns on "as man's unbelieving taste came round." Her reaction is physical and ugly. She stamps her "shoeless foot," wipes back "soot-black hair with clenching fist," and spits through "yellow teeth," where the sound of "hist" imitates the hiss itself. She swears by powers that "like as footboys on her actions wait," which is a funny comparison. The powers of a woman with no shoes are pictured as liveried servants, and the grandeur is borrowed from the very Squires and Lords she promised. The curse then climbs by stages: fortune's scale will turn, good will change to bad, he will be "Lost to this world and all eternity," and he will be "poor as Job."
The ending changes the poem's shape. The couplets give way to crossed rhyme (unblest, cast, possesst, last), with two indented lines that sound like the speaker's own voice cutting in. The first, "Alas, for fourpence how my die is cast!", is a wry shrug. It brings back the groat, now fourpence, and sets the small coin against the huge consequence of hell. The last line, "be shoved to hell at last!", is blunt, and nothing after it tells us the curse is empty. The speaker is amused, but he leaves the threat standing.
That uncertainty is what makes the poem worth reading. It is a vivid, closely observed picture of a figure often reduced to a stereotype, even though the speaker's own words show the stereotype at work. It also shows a mind caught between two ages of belief, the boy who paid for hope and the man who refuses to, and unsure whether the refusal has cost him something.