Clare's spring comes without any fanfare. The opening line, "The Spring is come, and Spring flowers coming too," is plain, almost clumsy, and the repetition makes it sound like someone saying aloud what he has just noticed. The grammar matters, too. "Is come" says the season has arrived, while "coming" says it is still arriving. That fits a title like "Early Spring," and the whole poem stays in this half-finished moment, when the year has turned but hasn't yet shown off.
The first lines are a small inventory of flowers: the crocus, "patty kay," "the rich hearts' ease," the polyanthus. Several of these names sound like local speech rather than a botanist's vocabulary. The polyanthus "peeps with blebs of dew," and the stubby plosives of "peeps" and "blebs" give the flower the look of a small creature poking its head out, with dew like beads or blisters on it. Then comes the line with the most personality: "oer the odd flowers swim grandfather bees." Calling the bees "grandfather" makes them old, slow and a little ceremonious, and "swim" suggests they drift through air that is thick and mild. "Odd" may mean scattered or few, which would suit early spring, though that is an inference. Notice, too, that this fifth line has no punctuation at the end. The stanza seems to spill over into the next scene instead of closing.
That scene is the farmyard, and the poem becomes almost comic. The cow "rests," the dogs "sit on their haunches near the pail," and the smallest dog performs his duty by growling "bow wow" at the stranger. Then he "hurries to the door and cocks his tail" to gnaw his bone. The bark is all bluster, and Clare quietly lets us see through it. Putting "bow wow" in quotation marks makes it sound like a child's word, and it rhymes with "cow" and "now," so the dog's noise is built into the poem's sound pattern. Spellings such as "knaw" and "oer," as printed here, keep the voice close to speech and away from polish.
The structure is looser than it first appears. The poem runs to twelve lines, five followed by seven, and the rhymes shift to match. The opening five rhyme *too / ease / dew / trees / bees*, a pattern with a doubled last note. The remaining seven alternate between *cow, bow wow, cow, now* and *pail, tail, flail*. The lines are mostly close to ten syllables, a loose iambic pentameter, but they never march. They sound like talk. One telling detail is that "cow" is used as a rhyme word twice, in lines six and ten. The poem could have varied it, but it comes back to the same animal, which stands "placid" at the gate and frames the scene. A repeated rhyme word feels less like a trick and more like a glance returning to something steady.
The ending is where the poem's idea becomes clear. "The thresher's lumping flail / Is all the noise the spring encounters now." "Lumping" is a heavy, thudding word, and it imitates the dull beat of the tool. The thresher himself is never seen, only heard, so human work enters the poem as a sound in the background. The verb "encounters" is also strange and good. It makes Spring a visitor walking into the village, much like the "stranger" the little dog barks at, and the only thing that meets it is the thump of a flail. There are no skylarks and no great announcements. The season arrives into an ordinary working day.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. Clare is known for poems rooted in the English countryside, and here he gives a cottage cow, a show-off puppy and some half-open flowers the same attention that other poems might give to something grander. The poem suggests that spring is not a single event but a gathering of small, stubborn signs, and that you notice it by looking at the yard in front of you.