A walk down a path in haymaking season, and almost everything that matters in John Clare's ten lines happens through the nose. The word "smelt" appears twice, first for the blossom that "Smelt sweet as gardens wheresoever met" and then for the cut grass that "Smelt so deliciously". The poem is a small scene of sensory abundance. Flowers, hay, a bee and a passer-by are all caught up in the same sweetness, and the last two are comically alike. The bee is bewildered because the hay smells like a flower, and the human walker, tempted by the same scent, bends down and grabs a handful.
The first line is worth a pause. The supplied text reads "beams in blossom", but flowers with "spots of jet" that smell so sweet are almost certainly bean flowers, which have black markings, so "beams" looks like a misprint. Either way, the image is exact. Clare picks out the black-on-white detail of a single blossom, and the comparison to "gardens" is a quiet compliment. A working field smells as good as a cultivated garden, with no one needing to plant it for pleasure.
The poem is built from five rhyming couplets (jet/met, swath/path, lay/hay, bee/be, rows/nose), and the rhythm is a loose, easy iambic pentameter. The couplets keep the pace of a walk, one step after another, but Clare doesn't let them become tidy little boxes. The longest sentence runs from the briar rose across several lines, and the break after "the grass that lay" pushes us straight into "Bleaching beneath the twittering heat to hay". Because the sentence spills over the rhyme, the verse feels as unhurried as the afternoon. The syntax stretches too. "Smelt so deliciously, the puzzled bee / Went wondering" quietly leaves out the "that" we would expect, and the result is conversational rather than formal.
The imagery layers colour and sense. The black "jet" of the blossom gives way to the briar rose "White over with its flowers", and then to grass "Bleaching" in the sun. That sets up a pattern of dark against pale, then whiteness spreading, which makes the landscape look sun-washed. The best phrase is "twittering heat". Heat is silent, but Clare lends it a sound, so the shimmer over the cut grass seems to chirp like the insects and birds one imagines in it. It is a compact piece of synaesthesia, and it makes the warmth something you hear as well as feel.
The bee is the poem's best joke. The "puzzled bee / Went wondering where the honey sweets could be" is lightly personified, and the double sense in "wondering" (both wandering and puzzling) suits an insect zigzagging over the rows. Its confusion is a compliment to the hay, whose smell is so rich that it outdoes the flowers the bee knows how to find.
Then the human arrives, and the last line brings the tone down to earth. Clare gives us a "passer-bye" with no name or story, and the action is quick and physical: "Stoopt down and whipt a bit beneath his nose". The short, clipped words and the spellings "stoopt" and "whipt", which look like speech written down, make the gesture feel snatched and instinctive. Ending on "nose" is a little undignified, and that suits the poem. After the delicate "honey sweets", we get a plain bodily pleasure. The walker behaves just like the bee, hunting for sweetness, and in doing so becomes one more creature in the field rather than an observer standing apart.
The poem's lasting interest lies in that levelling. Clare, who wrote from the Northamptonshire countryside he knew, doesn't use the landscape as a backdrop for grand reflection. He pays attention to a briar hanging "right across the path", a swath of cut grass and a stooping stranger, and trusts these to be enough. The "Field Path" of the title is also where the poem's world meets ours, since the path is the thing we walk along while reading. Nothing dramatic happens, and the scene is a small one, but it is full of pleasure in what is simply there, in smell, in sun and in an ordinary moment of delight that a bee and a man happen to share.