Clare spends most of this short poem telling the reader not to cry. Infants "need no tear"; they are "Needing no prayers"; "All prayers are needless, beads they need not tell." Their graves are not places of loss but "steps of angels," a stairway between earth and heaven, and the children are "Earth's brightest gems of innocence," jewels set in the ground rather than taken from it. The central idea is a consoling one. Because infants die before they have sinned or suffered, death is a gentle homecoming ("God is their parent"), and grief is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.
Yet the poem cannot quite keep its own rule. The more it forbids tears, the more it fills with them. "Flowers weep in dew-drops oer them," the gale "gently sighs," "White flowers their mourners are, Nature their passing bell." The human mourners are told to stand down, and the natural world takes over their job. This shift is the poem's real subject. The argument says there is nothing to mourn, but the imagery shows how hard it is to believe that. The plainest admission comes in the middle of the first stanza, in a line with no consolation in it at all: "Gone are the bright rays of their soft blue eyes."
The imagery works by pairing opposites. "A bud their lifetime and a flower their close" squeezes a whole life into a single act of blossoming, so that these children never get past the first bloom. The most striking phrase is "a sunny shower," which opens the second stanza. Sun and rain arrive together, and the lives "melt" on flowers "as tears melt from the eye," so that brightness and weeping become one thing. The word "Iris" in the first stanza has a similar double life. It names the rainbow, a flower and the coloured part of the eye, and it appears just two lines before the "soft blue eyes." Whether or not Clare meant the echo, the rainbow, which needs both sun and rain, fits the poem's mixed feeling. "Amaranth," a flower traditionally imagined as unfading, lifts the children's deaths into "Heaven's" garden. Even the heavenly place is made of plants.
The form is quiet and controlled. Each stanza has nine lines rhymed ababbcbcc, with the longer last line that marks a Spenserian stanza, the form of Edmund Spenser's *The Faerie Queene*. A form so often used for long poems is here pressed into two short stanzas, almost like an inscription on a gravestone. The rhythm is a smooth iambic beat with soft line endings, and it has the steady sound of a hymn. Sibilants ("sunset's," "soft," "sighs," "sunny shower") add a hushed, breathing quality that suits the dew and the gale. The long final line of each stanza slows the pace and lets the closing image settle. The rhymes also repeat themselves, with "close" ending two lines of the first stanza. This could be read as carelessness, but it works as an echo, since the flower's close and the sunset's close are the same quiet ending seen twice. The repeated "need no" and "needless" act like a refrain, and they sound a little like someone reassuring both the reader and himself.
The second stanza turns the same gentleness on the moment of death. The children "bowed and trembled, and they left no sigh," like plants in a breeze, and "the sun smiled to show their end was well." The sun here is a witness who approves. The deaths "tolled on flowers" like bells, so the "passing bell" of the last line has been ringing softly all along. "Tell" is also worth noticing. It means to count rosary beads, but the poem is also telling us something, and the pun suggests a poem that is itself a kind of prayer while claiming prayer is not needed.
What makes the poem worth reading is this gap between what it says and what it feels. Clare is remembered chiefly as a poet of the English countryside, and the poem's instinct, judging by its imagery, is to look to the fields for comfort, so that dew, wind and white flowers do the mourning. It takes a familiar religious consolation, that the innocent are safe with God, and tests it against the physical world, where loss is still felt. The result is an elegy that is both calm and sad. It does not argue itself out of grief. It moves the grief into the landscape, where it can be expressed more gently.