"Three years and a quarter" is an oddly exact way to open a poem, and it sets the tone. The sailor-boy counts his time away the way a homesick person does, week by week. From that figure he looks back to one morning, the walk from his door to the sea, and in twenty-eight lines he makes it feel like the loss of a whole world. The central idea is that leaving home turns the familiar into the strange, and that the freedom he chose arrives with loneliness attached.
The first half of the poem is crowded with neighbours, though hardly any of them are people. The groundlark leaves its nest "like a neighbour which I knew," the pigeons coo over the lane, and the crows go "flopping oer the grain," a verb with a comic, shabby affection in it. Then comes a darker line: they are "dear old neighbours whom I shall see no more." The rhythm stays cheerful, but the sentence already knows the ending. By the fourth stanza the same birds have changed. "Crows and pigeons all were strangers as oer my head they flew." Nothing about the birds has altered. The boy has, and his leaving has rewritten the landscape. By the next stanza even "trees and bushes were all strangers," and he meets a milkmaid he doesn't know: "I was strange to the place." That is a striking admission for someone crossing his native fields, and the poem seems to suggest that departing makes a place foreign before you have physically left it.
The shadow stanza is the strangest. The sun rises over the furze, "the shadows grow to giants," and the shepherds' dogs bark at "my shadow" before they see the boy himself. He arrives in the world of the poem as a shape, something already half gone. The present tense in "grow" and "never stirs" freezes that moment, as if the sunrise were held still while he walks through it.
The form is plain and sturdy. The long lines have about seven beats and fall into rhymed couplets (fireside/wide, grew/knew, village/tillage), with a pause in the middle of most lines. The effect is a walking pace, or a song a boy might sing to himself. Folk touches such as "a-rising" and "a-flying" add to this, and a few loose lines, like the one about the shepherds and their dogs, keep it from sounding mechanical. The vocabulary is nearly all everyday: church clock, lads and lasses, labour, tillage. Even the one patriotic flourish, "English colours were a-flying where the British squadron lay," is brief and impersonal beside the lingering over birds and lanes.
The sea is where the poem's habits of mind show most clearly. He reaches it with relief ("a pleasing sight to me"), but he can only describe it in a farmer's language. In the first couplet he goes "to plough the ocean wide," and in the last stanza the sea is "briny ocean" to plough again, set directly after he has left "the labour and the tillage." He has swapped fields for waves, yet the old vocabulary comes with him. The last stanza's list of what he leaves (parents, church clock, village) is written in a steady "I left … I left …" rhythm, like a farewell said over and over. Then the sea "soon became my joy," and the final line complicates that: "I sat and sang among the shrouds, a lonely sailor-boy." Singing and loneliness sit side by side. "Shrouds" are the ropes of a ship's rigging, but the word also has a funeral sound, and it is hard not to hear that faint echo next to "no more." The reason for going is only given as "through love," and the poem never says love of what: the sea, adventure, a person. That vagueness leaves the choice feeling both willing and unexplained.
The poem matters for how it handles a familiar subject. A sailor's ballad might be expected to offer storms, battles or glory. This one stays on land almost to the end and makes the departure an inventory of small, local things. Clare is a poet closely tied to the English countryside, and that attention shows here. The sailor-boy is more homesick than adventurous, and the poem trusts crows, hedges and a milkmaid to carry that feeling.