A walk at dusk, a quiet wood, a girl with a milk-pail: John Clare's "Song" has almost no plot, and that is its strength. In sixteen lines it moves from perfect calm to sudden disturbance, and the whole change is set off by a single look. The central idea is that love arrives as an ambush. The speaker is not seeking it, and it takes his peace from him before he can defend it.
The first stanza builds that peace carefully. The speaker "roamed" under hazel bowers, a word with no purpose or destination in it. Even the "gloomy eve" turns out to be gentle, since the scene is "soothing" and his soul "right pleased." The simile that sums up his state is the best in the stanza: his breast is "calm as summer's sea / When waves forget to roll." The verb "forget" is what makes it work. It suggests a calm so deep that even nature's restlessness lapses. But a sea that has merely forgotten to move can start again at any moment.
The hares are easy to overlook, but they matter. They are "timid," "darting out" to "crop the dewy flowers," small creatures that feed only while nothing threatens them. In the second stanza the poem quietly turns the speaker into one of them. His soul is "startled," the same instinct as the hares' timidity, and Nelly's glance arrives "like a hawk from covert sprung," the hawk bursting from its hiding place to "pounce." The speaker is the hare caught in the open, his peace the thing carried off. Nothing in the first stanza announces this, which is why the hawk comes as such a shock.
Clare complicates the picture with Nelly herself. She is no predator. She "lightly skipt the stile" and carries an ordinary "milk-pail on her arm," and her look is "careless," tossed off without thought. The violence belongs to the effect, not the intention. She is light and unaware, and he is the one who is wounded. The word "flung" in "one careless look on me she flung" gives the glance a physical, almost thrown quality, so that the look becomes an object that lands.
The poem also plays on light. The evening is "gloomy," yet Nelly's look is "as bright as parting day." The comparison flatters her, and it also hints at something fleeting, since a parting day is already leaving. Even the "placid smile" of evening is "short," as if the poem knows that calm cannot last. The phrase "my startled soul to charm" holds a neat double meaning. Evening tries to charm him in the sense of soothing him, while Nelly charms him in the older sense of casting a spell.
The form suits this small drama. Each stanza has eight lines rhyming ABABCDCD, with long lines of four beats alternating with shorter ones of three, a rhythm close to ballad or hymn measure. That lilting, singable movement fits the title, which suggests, judging by the form, a piece meant to be sung. The regular rhymes (*bowers/flowers*, *smile/stile*, *arm/charm*) also give the poem a tidy surface, and that tidiness makes the disruption stronger. The last line is the shortest in effect, ending on "away." The rhyme with "day" closes the poem, but the sense is of loss, of peace carried off and not coming back.
Its significance is modest but real. Clare does not reach for classical gods or abstract emotions to describe love. He uses what his speaker would actually see on an evening walk: a wood, hares, a hawk, a stile, a milk-pail. Love is understood through the country world, and the country world is made to carry feeling. The poem is slight in length but exact in method. It sets up a calm, brings in a quiet animal, and then lets one glance turn the speaker into the hare and Nelly into the hawk.