Boys chasing a hay wagon for the free ride home are an odd way to begin a letter, but John Clare makes them the key to the whole thing. The speaker has "leisure on three sides a sheet / Of foolscap" and fills it with rhyme for no better reason than the boys have for running: fun. Writing verse is a game, a way to "kill a care" and to offer something to a friend, since the letter is "to friendship turned in rhyme." The central idea is that poetry can be play and a gift at once, and that a writer can laugh at his own habit of rhyming without giving it up.
The poem is built from two extended similes, each opening with "Like" and turning on "So." The first compares the poet to boys who have half a day free from school and spend it clinging to a hay cart. The second compares him to children racing to touch an orchard wall or tree, where the one left behind "Turns short, determined to be first the next." Both come from a country childhood, and they feel remembered rather than borrowed. Clare grew up in rural Northamptonshire, so it is tempting to hear lived experience in them, though the poem itself only shows that he knew these scenes well. The second simile does more than the first. It lets the speaker turn from winner into loser. The muse has "run me hard and long," and he is the tired child who, instead of conceding, changes the rules.
The form carries the joke. The poem is in rhyming couplets of ten-syllable lines, the steady, well-mannered metre that suits a polite letter. Clare then puts pressure on it with wordplay. "Dance with poesy's measured feet" puns on the metrical feet that carry the verse, and "ride post upon the wings of time" quietly doubles as a postal image, since riding post meant travelling fast by relay horses, and this is, after all, a letter. The muse is a horse as well as a racer: her "gallop hurries me in sport." Sentences run across several lines, like the first four, which pour forward in one breath and imitate the running they describe. Some rhymes are loose. "Sport" and "divert" are not a perfect pair, and the looseness fits a poet who says he has "less of wit than will." The self-deprecation is charming, and it also tells us how the poem wants to be read, as a quick, friendly scribble rather than a monument.
The ending is the best trick. Tired of the muse's race, the speaker decides to "turn round" and "beat her out by ending it in prose." Yet he announces this in verse, in a rhyming couplet that pairs "close" with "prose." The word for what is not poetry is itself caught inside a rhyme. Either the muse has the last laugh, or the speaker does, by letting her win while pretending to escape. Judging by the wording, the letter presumably carries on in plain prose after the verse stops, though the poem only gives us the announcement. Either way, the joke works as a small performance of modesty: he has made a perfectly shaped piece of rhyme in order to say he is done with rhyming.
What makes the poem significant is how much it shows in so small a space. We can easily think of Clare as a poet of landscape and feeling, and here he is quick, teasing and aware of his own craft. The poem also keeps alive the idea of the verse letter, a kind of writing in which the form is a way of being friendly. Its images of hay, schooldays and orchard races give literary self-mockery a rural, childlike setting, and the result is a poem that tells us poetry can be hard work and still be a game.