John Clare is best known as a poet of the English countryside and the ordinary people in it, and here he gives us a single figure in motion rather than a story: a young woman walking through the streets, trying not to be noticed. The poem's central idea is that her shyness is a whole temperament, not a weakness or an illness. It governs how she reacts to strangers, to a rough admirer, to someone she trusts, and finally to the weather.
The poem is built as seven rhyming couplets, fourteen lines in all, though it is not a sonnet. Each couplet closes neatly, and that tidy, end-stopped movement suits a girl who keeps herself buttoned up. The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, with a pleasant, almost sing-song regularity ("Hale as the morn and happy as her song"). The tone is affectionate rather than pitying, and the smooth music makes the watching feel gentle. The speaker seems to be an observer who likes what he sees and has no wish to frighten her further.
The poem's structure is a widening circle of approach. First comes the anonymous "passer bye," then the "forward clown," a word that in older English could simply mean a country fellow. Then comes the unnamed "one" who whispers "pleasing fancies" in her ear, and last the wind. Fear is the refrain: she is "Afraid of praise," the favoured admirer "never feels a fear," and by the end she "shuns and fears." That second "Yet" at line 11 ("Yet een from him") gives the poem its sharpest turn. We expect the trusted suitor to be the exception, but she still pulls back from "a rude embrace," and the clipped "een" nearly makes her flinch audible.
The verbs trace her body language, and one of them changes meaning as the poem goes on. In line 6 the clown "holds her by the gown to make her stay," so she is the one being held. By line 12 she is "stooping" and "holds her hands before her face," and in the last line she "holds her shawl." The same verb moves from other people's grip to her own self-protection, as if she has learned to hold herself together before anyone else can.
Clare also refuses an easy reading of her as frail. She is "The picture of good health," "Hale as the morn," and she is evidently singing as she goes. Judging by those lines, the "delicate air" of the title describes her manner, not her body. Her shyness sits alongside cheerfulness and robust energy, and she hurries along happily. The word "air" may also be doing double duty. The title speaks of her air, her bearing, and the poem ends with the "bolder wind" that she shuns. That personified wind becomes one more forward suitor, tugging at her shawl, and the slightly comic escalation shows how far her wariness extends.
The last line, "And holds her shawl, and often looks behind," leaves the poem unresolved. The glance backward could be fear of pursuit, or checking whether anyone has noticed her, or perhaps some curiosity she will not admit. The poem does not decide, and that openness keeps the portrait from hardening into a type.
The poem is significant for what it notices and how little it needs to do so. In fourteen lines, with plain words like "shy," "turns," "holds" and "shuns," it makes a believable, living person out of a few gestures and a small world of streets, gowns and shawls. It gives dignity to a figure who might easily have been treated as a joke or a sentimental ideal. And it treats an ordinary, easily overlooked personality, the person who tries to disappear, as worth a careful look.