A young man sits alone under a willow, peeling straws, snapping off switches and flicking at flies. It is the least heroic picture of heartbreak imaginable, and John Clare's "Song" gets much of its charm and sadness from that. The speaker is in love, or rather sick with it ("My illness was love, though I knew not the smart"), and his response is to withdraw. He avoids crowds as "noises too rude" and runs to "the silence of sweet solitude." The poem asks whether that retreat is a refuge or a slow self-burial.
The first stanza builds its case through exaggeration. His "flesh, blood, and marrow" turn to "dry bone," a line that sounds almost like a folk curse, and the plural subject with the singular verb ("was turned") gives it a rough, spoken ring. Then comes the stanza's central image, a flower that "buds, blossoms, and fades" in "green darkness," unseen by shepherds or "flower-loving maids." The speaker clearly sees himself in it. The flower's whole life, from bud to fading, happens without being noticed, and the "hermit bees" visit "but once and away." The stanza ends in a morbid wish: "There I'll bury alive and in silence decay." The sentence is oddly unfinished, since the verb has no object, as if even the grammar is burying itself.
The second stanza turns, and the poem becomes funnier. The speaker looked at a woman "too long" until "silence and shame stole the use of my tongue." The details are painfully recognisable. When he could speak, he had "nothing to say," and once she has wandered too far to hear, he suddenly has "something to tell." His only recourse is to "send sighs behind her" and walk "to my cell." The word "cell" is double-edged. It could suggest a monk's room or a prison, and either way he has shut himself in.
The sound of the poem keeps this unhappiness light. It is written in rhyming couplets, and the lines bounce along in a loose, galloping rhythm with four beats and plenty of extra unstressed syllables ("I PEELED bits of STRAWS and I GOT switches TOO"). That lilt suits the title, because it is built to be sung or chanted. Almost every rhyme is plain and full: *smart/heart*, *tongue/long*, *tell/cell*. The jingle sits in tension with the content, so that decay and madness are delivered in the tune of a nursery rhyme. The effect is that of someone making a joke of his own misery, and the joking makes it easier to believe.
The repetition is just as telling. The speaker returns to "willow switches" and "peeled bits of straws" in the second stanza, and the poem seems to go round in a circle, like a day with nothing in it. Then he reimagines his loneliness as a rival to society: "My ball room the pasture, my music the bees, / My drink was the fountain, my church the tall trees." Each item swaps a human pleasure (dancing, an orchestra, wine, worship) for something from the fields. It reads as proud and as consolation, but also as a list of everything he lacks. "Ever lonely in crowds, in Nature's own laws" is a neat paradox, since he is lonely even among people and finds the only fitting company outside them.
The last couplet is a rhetorical question: "Who ever would love or be tied to a wife / When it makes a man mad all the days of his life?" It is bitter, wry and a little defensive, the sort of verdict a hurt person reaches for when he cannot have what he wants. The word "mad" carries real weight. After the dry bones and the burial, it nudges the poem from teasing self-pity towards something more troubling, though the song's cheerful beat never quite admits this.
"Song" is worth reading for exactly this mixture. Clare writes in plain country speech about the English countryside, and he lets a trivial, even comic scene hold a real emotional crisis. The poem does not resolve the speaker's pain. It lets us hear how shyness, longing and pride can leave someone sitting alone with a pile of peeled straws, and how that situation can be both funny and quietly alarming.