Clare gives his maid no hat, a weathered brown face and a short temper, and then lets her run. The portrait takes only fourteen lines, yet it builds a whole character: a farmhouse servant who is plump, cheerful, hard-working and prickly about the wrong things. Her defining quality is energy. Whatever people say about her (fat, pretty, proud), she slips out from under it, because she is busy.
The opening sets up a small joke. "Bonny and stout and brown, without a hat" strings plain adjectives together with "and", almost like a description of a prize animal at a fair. The next line has her frowning at the word "fat". The speaker's answer, "Yet fat she is", is cheekily blunt, the voice of a neighbour teasing over a fence. The teasing is warm, though. She is "the merriest in the place", and the pretty face comes in as a pleasant afterthought. The poem prefers honest looking to polite flattery, and it treats her sunburnt, unladylike appearance as part of her charm.
The form suits her. The poem is written in iambic pentameter, in seven rhyming couplets. Fourteen lines is sonnet length, but there is no sonnet's turn and no argument building toward a conclusion. Instead each couplet works as a self-contained snapshot: the frown, the face, the games in the yard, the hens, the market, the men. The pairs click shut and the girl moves on to the next job, so the structure feels like her day. The rhymes are plain and domestic: hat/fat, play/away/day. "Where" and "dear" rhyme only roughly to a modern ear, which adds to the casual, spoken feel.
The verbs carry the poem. She "does the work", "runs out", "hurries", "gambols", "laughs", "quarrels". Work and play keep blurring. Line six sets them side by side ("does the work, and oft runs out to play"), and the egg-hunting passage then merges them. She is eager because the eggs are "dear", meaning valuable, so her motive is practical, yet chasing hens that "lay away" in hidden corners sounds a lot like a game. Even the market-day goal is sandwiched between scenes of romping. The mop shows the same blur. A tool of drudgery becomes a prank when she will "spring the mop upon the servant boys", ambushing them with it.
Clare's word choices also tie her to her surroundings. "Ramp" is an old, rough word for romping about, and "noise" is used as a verb twice: she and the yard will "ramp and noise", and the old hens "noise and cackle every where". The same word covers the girl and the poultry, so she seems as much a part of the farmyard racket as the birds are. This is affectionate rather than insulting. Nothing in the tone suggests she is lesser for it.
The ending leaves a small puzzle. She ignores praise entirely, yet she "only quarrels when they call her proud". The final rhyme, aloud/proud, links her loud laughter with the one charge that stings. Judging by the text, this might be because "proud" accuses her of setting herself above the others, when everything she does says she wants to be one of them, joking and gambolling with the men. It might also be that the label hits a little too close. The poem doesn't decide, and that openness keeps her from becoming a simple type.
The poem matters for how it looks at a working woman. She is not a idealised shepherdess in pastoral costume. She is fat, tanned, noisy and busy, and she is dignified by her vitality rather than her beauty. Clare, a farm labourer's son from Helpston in Northamptonshire, wrote about country people from the inside, and the poem's yard details (the mop, the hens, the market day) have that ring of familiarity. The speaker teases but never sneers. In fourteen lines, built mostly from verbs and homely nouns, a girl who hates being labelled gets a portrait that doesn't try to pin her down.