Most poems about trees reach quickly for a meaning: time passing, mortality, the human soul. John Clare's maple does nothing of the kind. It stands there and is looked at, patiently and in detail, and the poem's real surprise is that by the final lines the looking has turned into love.
The first six lines read like a naturalist's field notes. The flowers are "tassel flowers of green," the seed is "staghorn-shaped" and turning red, and the leaves are "scolloped" and only "just spreading out." That last phrase pins the poem to one particular moment in the tree's year, when everything is still unfolding. Clare also corrects himself mid-line: the leaves are "of yellowish hue, yet beautifully green." He seems unwilling to settle for the easy colour word and wants the exact one. The bark then arrives in a clothing image: "ribbed like corderoy in seamy screed." I read "screed" as a strip or band, though that is an inference, and the spellings "corderoy" and "scolloped" keep a plain, unpolished feel that suits this unshowy kind of attention.
From line 7 the eye travels downward, from the branches to the ground around the trunk. The hemlock with its "white umbel flowers" (an umbel is the umbrella-shaped flower cluster) "towers" up from the "stoven," a dialect word that appears to mean a stump or the spreading base of a cut tree. Placing "towers" beside a mere plant makes the undergrowth feel like a miniature forest. Moss "spreads, dark green," and the "blotched leaved orchis" and "blue bell flowers" grow "thickly" beneath the leaves. Colour piles up across the poem, with green, red, yellow, white and blue. Yet green keeps returning, and it comes to feel like the poem's home colour.
The form shows the same patience. Fourteen lines suggest a sonnet, but the rhymes do not follow a tidy sonnet pattern. The poem opens with a promising ABAABA pattern, then the same two sounds keep coming back. "Green" ends lines 1, 4 and 9, and "seen" ends lines 3, 6 and 11. Six of the fourteen line-endings are therefore just two words. A strict critic might call that a limited supply of rhymes, but it also means the poem's chief verb, "seen," is built into its structure. The rhythm is a loose iambic pentameter, steady and unhurried like a walking pace. Words such as "flowers" and "hours" can be said as one syllable or two, so the lines stretch and relax rather than march.
The most important moment is the shift at line 12. Until then there is no "I" at all, only things being seen. Then comes "I love to see them gemmed with morning hours," followed by a second "I love" in line 13. The repetition lifts the poem from description to feeling. The phrase "gemmed with morning hours" is a little strange, since we might expect dew, and Clare gives us time itself as the jewel. The plants are decorated by the early hours of the day. The "lone green places" suggests he values these spots precisely because they are out of the way.
The last line completes an image planted at the start. The bark was "corderoy" with its "seams," and now the tree has "the sweet clothing of the maple tree." The mosses, flowers and leaves around it are its wardrobe, and the tree is dressed rather than merely described. That quiet link between line 5 and line 14 gives the poem a shape that the loose rhyme scheme does not.
The poem's significance lies in what it chooses to value. Clare is remembered as a poet of the English countryside, and here the subject is not a grand oak or a sweeping view. It is a maple, a stump, some moss and a few small flowers in an unvisited corner. The poem asks us to see that exact observation can carry real emotion, and that love can simply be the name for the attention we pay to a place.