Clare's flower is not the cheerful primrose of spring hedgerows but the evening primrose, whose pale blossoms open as the sun goes down. In fourteen lines he follows it through a single night, from opening to withering, and turns its life into a small drama about beauty that nobody is awake to see.
The opening is gentle. Evening is given a body, and dew-drops "pearl the evening's breast". The verb "pearl" turns moisture into jewellery, as if the night had dressed for the occasion. The flower is "almost as pale as moonbeams are, / Or its companionable star", and "companionable" is the warmest word in the poem. Flower and star keep each other company, two faint lights in the same dim hour. "Opes anew" suggests a ritual repeated every evening, and the old-fashioned "opes" gives it a slightly formal air, like a door being opened for a guest.
At line seven the mood turns. The primrose becomes a "shunning-hermit of the light", with the hyphen fusing avoidance and solitude into one image. Then comes the poem's sharpest verb: the flower "wastes its fair bloom upon the night". The night is personified as a lover who receives the flower's "fond caresses" but is "blindfold" to them and "Knows not the beauty he possesses." The grammar is slightly slippery here. "Who" most naturally points back to the night, but it could also glance at the hermit-flower, which would make the flower the one ignorant of its own beauty. The poem never settles the question, and either reading leaves the same sad irony in "possesses": beauty is held, but not known.
The form supports this. The poem runs in tidy rhyming couplets (west/breast, anew/dew, light/night), and the lines are mostly eight-syllable iambic beats, an easy, songlike rhythm. Two lines break the pattern. "Who, blindfold to its fond caresses" and "Knows not the beauty he possesses" are the only lines with an extra unstressed syllable at the end, a soft, trailing rhyme that seems to linger just where the night fails to notice. Earlier, "Wastes its fair bloom upon the night" begins on a stress, so the harsh verb lands first and the line starts with a small jolt.
The ending brings the day, and Clare sets its eye against the night's blindness. Night cannot see the flower, but morning sees it too much: "day looks out with open eye". The flower is "Abashed at the gaze it cannot shun", and the repeated word is a neat trap. Earlier the primrose was "shunning" the light, and now the light is something it cannot shun. "Abashed" and "faints" give the flower the manner of a shy person who blushes under attention. The last line, "It faints and withers, and is done", is plain and nearly all single syllables. The final rhyme of "shun" with "done" shuts the poem without comfort or moral.
The poem is significant because it sets up an audience problem and quietly solves it. Within the story, the flower's beauty has no witness. The night is blind and the day is fatal. The only one who sees it is the poet, and by the end, the reader. The poem's careful attention, its pearled dew, its pale star, its fainting bloom, supplies the observer the flower lacks. That fits Clare's reputation as a poet of the English countryside who looked closely at small living things, though the poem itself is enough to show that habit of mind.
It also resists an easy lesson. A weaker poem might scold the night for its blindness or praise the flower's modesty. Clare does neither. He calls the bloom "fair" and "delicate" and its giving "fond", yet he also uses the word "wastes", and he lets that tension stand. The result is a short poem with a lasting ache: some beauty exists only briefly, in the wrong light for being noticed, and a poem may be the only place it is ever seen.