Most poets would rather praise April. John Clare, an English poet whose work is rooted in the countryside, begins by greeting November, the month of bare branches and bad weather, like a difficult friend: "I love thee, rude and boisterous as thou art." The word "rude" matters here, since it means rough and unpolished, and the whole poem rests on the idea that roughness can be lovable. Its central idea has two sides. There is joy hidden in wild weather, and the poet, standing in the middle of it, feels his own songs fall short of the storm's.
The form is a fourteen-line sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhymed *abab cdcd efef gg*, the pattern Shakespeare used. Within that tidy frame, the poem follows the life of a storm. The first quatrain addresses the month. The second describes the tempest arriving and passing. The third turns to the speaker, and the couplet ends on a wish. Clare lets the syntax spill across line endings like gusts of wind. "The start / Of sudden tempests" breaks off at "start," so the reader is jolted just as the weather jolts the walker, and the leaves are stirred "Into hoarse fury" across another line break. Then the rain, "set free," does something surprising: it "Stills the huge swells." The storm is calmed by its own downpour. The line "Then ebb the mighty heaves" has an inverted word order that seems to ebb along with them.
The imagery turns the woodland into water. The forest sways "like a troubled sea," and "swells" and "heaves" belong to the ocean as much as to the trees. Clare's diction is heavy with monosyllables, such as "huge," "hoarse" and "mighty," which give the storm weight. Against these he sets small, humble words. The joy he finds is only "scraps," picked up as his "wandering" carries him along. That phrase suggests someone walking out in the weather rather than watching it through a window, though this is an inference from the text.
The vocabulary of devotion and magic gives the month a mind of its own. November is a "Sybil," a prophetess, and also a "worshipper of winds," so the poet's love for the month echoes the month's own devotion to the wind. The noise it makes is a "wizard noise," as if the storm were casting a spell. Weather becomes something with a voice and perhaps a message.
The third quatrain is the most interesting. The speaker answers the storm by raving "in turn," but he describes his own output as "Half-vacant thoughts and rhymes of careless form." This is a charming pose of modesty, and it is not quite believable, because the poem in which he says it is carefully built. He then shelters "Neath ivied oak" and can only "mutter to the storm." After "hoarse fury" and "uproarious madness," the verb "mutter" shows how small a human voice is out there. The oak and its ivy suggest he does not fight the weather but waits it out.
The couplet turns the poem's love into longing: "Wishing its melody belonged to me, / That I might breathe a living song to thee." The word "breathe" borrows from the wind itself, so the poet's ideal song would be made of the same stuff as the storm. "Living" implies that the storm's music is alive in a way written verse can never quite be. The ending is a wish rather than a triumph. Yet the sonnet we have just read is the song he says he cannot sing, and that quiet paradox gives the final lines their charm.
The poem matters because it is both a tribute and a confession. It finds beauty in an unglamorous season and makes a reader see a gale as music rather than nuisance. It also reverses the usual picture of the poet as master of nature. Here nature is the true singer, and the poet is a damp, grateful listener under a tree.