A holly bush is hardly a glamorous subject, and Clare doesn't pretend otherwise. He calls it "a sober lump of green". The word "lump" is homely, almost comic, and "sober" makes the bush sound like a plainly dressed churchgoer among showier neighbours. Yet in the same line it "shines", and by the fourth it has "all the leafy luxury of May." That swing from lump to luxury sets up the poem's argument: winter, which we expect to be bare and hostile, holds pockets of richness for anyone who looks closely.
The poem describes a walk along a sheltered path on a bitter day. The first four lines view the holly from outside, bright against "leafless shrubs all brown and grey." Then the exclamation "And O it is delicious" carries the speaker into the scene. "Delicious" is a surprising word for winter weather. It belongs to taste, and it suggests that warmth is enjoyed almost physically, like a hot drink after the cold. The central idea is that comfort is sharpened by hardship. The walk is pleasant because the day is harsh, and Clare keeps the cold in view by repeating the word: winter is "keen" in line 3, and the day blows "keenly" in line 6.
The poem has fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but its rhymes run ABAB BCCA DEDEEB, which is not a standard sonnet pattern. The opening quatrain is tidy, with alternating rhymes (green, grey, keen, May). After that the pattern loosens, as if the speaker had left the main road for a winding path. The last word, "away", rhymes with "May", "grey" and "day", so the poem circles back to its opening image of spring-like green. The rhythm is loosely iambic pentameter that bends toward speech, and the contracted "eer" in "be it eer so keen" keeps the voice casual. From line 5 to the end there is one long sentence, and Clare uses line breaks to make it feel like walking. "To go where gravel pathways creep between" stops on "between", and the next line begins with the "Arches of evergreen" the path runs into.
The imagery is domestic and physical. The day is personified as someone in "winter's loaded garment" who "turns her back on sudden falling snows". She hunches away from the weather, and the walker under the evergreens shares that gesture. The arches suggest a covered walkway, and they let through only "a single feather of the driving storm." The phrase shrinks a blizzard to something light enough to drift down unnoticed. It also introduces the idea of birds before any appear. Even the opposition of "leafless" and "leafy" in the first quatrain works like a miniature of the whole poem, with bareness and abundance sitting side by side.
The ending is the best part. Sound arrives at last: "dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm / To little birds that flirt and start away." The only dead things in a poem about evergreens are the fallen leaves, and they are the ones that bring the scene to life. "Sweet" and "alarm" sit oddly together, but the alarm is gentle, hardly more than a flutter. "Flirt" gives the birds a playful, almost coquettish quality. The poem finishes on a flicker of movement rather than a moral, and the reader is left with the image instead of being told what to make of it.
What makes the poem worth reading is its modesty and its unexpectedness. Clare, a poet of the English countryside, does not treat winter as an enemy to be defeated or a bleak backdrop for gloom. He treats it as a season with its own small comforts, found by walking slowly and noticing a holly, a path, a rustle in the leaves. For a student reader it is a good lesson in how much a poem can do with plain words, one winding sentence and a well-placed bird.