Death, in John Clare's poem, is a ruler who outranks every other ruler. The opening couplet makes the point with an image of control: the winds and waters, the wildest forces anyone can imagine, are held "as a courser in the rider's hand." A courser is a swift, powerful horse, and the rider need only loosen or tighten the rein to let it run or make it stand still. From there the poem moves from nature to human power. Kings and conquerors who think they command others turn out to be as helpless as the weather in the hands of something greater.
The imagery is almost entirely meteorological, and that is where the poem is most inventive. Hopes are washed away "as showers at night wash out the steps of day." A violent death is a groan "like tempests in the trees," while a gentle one is like a storm that "drops" on an autumn afternoon. Death itself comes "with noiseless speed as swift as summer light." Even the tyrants are described in weather terms: their breath is "like to thunder." This turns out to be a trap, because the opening has already told us that Death commands winds and waters. A man who sounds like thunder is only a louder piece of the weather Death already controls.
The form helps this feeling of settled authority. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, mostly in iambic pentameter, and most lines end with a full stop of sense, so each pair of lines lands like a verdict: "command" and "hand," "will" and "still," "grave" and "slave." The stanzas are uneven, with six lines, then eight, then six and six, so the poem never becomes mechanical. The rhymes also carry the argument. "Clay" rhymes with "away" and, earlier, with "day," so the body's dust keeps pairing with disappearance.
One small oddity is worth noticing. Death begins as "his," with "his command" in the first line, but later "keeps her weapons out of sight." The poem does not explain the shift. It may simply reflect the habit of personifying Death in different ways, but the effect is that Death never settles into a single face. It is a force rather than a character.
The poem's heat rises in the third and fourth stanzas, which turn on the tyrants. The language is full of reversals. They "act the God in clay," a phrase that sets divine pretension beside the lowly material of the body. They "throw the heavens away" for "earth's glories," and their rage, which "planned hosts of murders at a breath," ends in "sound silence." That phrase is a quiet pun, since silence is here both complete and solid, like a sealed vault. The verb "sheath" is also telling. Their rage is put away like a sword, and an earlier simile has already called the tyrant "tame as a broken sword," so the tyrant is both weapon and wielder, and both are finished.
The most striking image comes in the fourth stanza: feet that "crushed down freedom to its grave / And felt the very earth they trod a slave." The tyrant's cruelty is so complete that even the ground beneath him is enslaved. Then the poem turns on a single word. The tyrants lie without "the power to crush the feeble worms," and the closing lines let those worms "Creep there to conquer and are not afraid." The word "afraid" completes the rhyme with "made," the "dreadful fears they made," so the final couplet sets the fear the tyrants created against the fearlessness that outlasts them.
"Worms" can be read in two ways. They are literally the creatures of the grave, but they can also stand for ordinary, powerless people, the ones the tyrants trampled. Either way the victory is grimly humble. Nobody storms a palace here; the powerful simply lie down and become food. The poem takes the old idea that death levels everyone and gives it a political edge.
Clare is best known for writing about the countryside, and the poem's weather and its attention to small creatures fit that world, even though its subject is power. What makes it worth reading is how it uses a conventional moral theme and a regular form to reach an unsettling picture: the greatest forces of nature belong to Death, and the humblest creatures inherit the earth the tyrant thought he owned.