In "I Dreamt of Robin" nothing is quite where it should be. The morning begins at starlight, a lover expected at evening shows up as a ghost, and by the end it is hard to say whether the dream predicted his visit or the visit simply finished the dream. John Clare, a poet of the English countryside, keeps the speaker's mind as unsettled as the hour, and the result is both tender and quietly funny.
The opening stanza lets the landscape do the feeling. The daisies are "quaking," the cowslip is "nodding its head," the grass is "all shivers." The speaker never says she is nervous, but the flowers behave like people waiting for news. Then comes "Robin that should come at e'en," a line that hangs unfinished, as if she has lost her thread. What she sees instead is "a ghost by moonlight, / Like a stalking horse stand on the green." A stalking horse was a shape hunters hid behind to approach their prey, so the image is stiff, upright and a little absurd. It is eerie and comic at once, a sweetheart reduced to a lumpish silhouette on the grass. The speaker's "old folks" suggest a young person living in a watchful household, and the poem's secrecy fits that.
In the second stanza the vision seeps into sleep. Robin "stood like a shadow transfixed by a stream," frozen like the figure on the green, and she "couldn't forget him for hours." Then the casement shakes "as if every pane in the window was broke," and the gravel makes "such a patter." The poem never says whether she hears this in her sleep or wakes to it. That deliberate blur is the poem's central idea. Longing is strong enough to dissolve the border between dreaming and the real world, and the real world seems to share the excitement.
The sound of the poem supports this. Each stanza has eight lines, alternating between roughly four and three beats in a bouncing, anapaestic rhythm: "I OPened the CASEment this MORN at STARlight." It moves like a song, which keeps the mood light even when ghosts appear. The first stanza chimes on one sound four times, in "starlight," "white," "bright" and "moonlight," so the rhyme itself seems to glitter. The second stanza settles into a neater ABABCDCD pattern. In the third the pattern frays. "Sit down" rhymes with itself, and "door" and "stir" never quite meet. Perhaps that looseness suits a speaker who is hurrying. The spellings "agen" and "his sen" give her a spoken, local voice, and "agen" appears both in "I went bed agen" and in the last line, so the poem's two sleepy returns are bookended by the same word.
The final stanza turns dream into evidence. She rises "before the cock crew," strikes a light, and sees "all his track in the dew," a physical trail that no ghost would leave. Even so, she is vague about her own actions: "I guess, called 'Come in and sit down.'" That "I guess" is a lovely touch, because she is still half inside the dream. Then "one, sure enough, tramples up to the door." The ghost has become a boy with heavy, muddy feet, and "who but young Robin his sen?" There is real relief in that question. The poem's last line is the biggest surprise: "We met, kissed, and parted agen." After twenty-three lines of build-up, the meeting is over in three verbs, hurried along because the "old folks" are not yet "half willing to stir." The deflation is funny, but it also makes the stolen moment feel more precious.
The poem matters because of how little it needs. There is no grand declaration of love, only dew, gravel, a window frame and a few trembling flowers. Clare trusts small, concrete details to carry the emotion, and he lets an everyday country voice describe a mind caught between sleeping and waking. The poem does not explain the feeling. It lets the weather, the garden and the doorstep show it.