Clare starts with a noise before he gives us a picture. "What a night!" is spoken aloud, the exclamation of someone who has just lived through it, and the line that follows is all breath and friction: the wind "howls, hisses, and but stops / To howl more loud." Even its pauses gather force. The snow is a "volley", a word borrowed from gunfire, that keeps up an "Incessant batter" at the window. The listener indoors isn't frightened, though. The attack only makes "our comfort feel as sweet again", so the storm is partly there to sharpen the pleasure of shelter.
The morning brings a different kind of drama. When the "tempest drops", the cottage doors are blocked by "mountainous heaps" until broom and shovel clear a path, leaving "a wall on either side". Clare repeats the rhyme word "stops" in lines one and seven, first for the wind and then for the drifted entrances, as if the poem itself were caught in the snow.
Each of the two stanzas runs to fourteen lines, so they have the length of a sonnet, but Clare's rhyming is looser and more improvised. The first stanza's rhymes interlock, and the old long-vowel sound is needed to make "pane" and "again" chime. The second stanza leans on repetition: "begin", "chin", "win" and "in" all crowd together, then "snow", "go" and "below". The effect feels like the boy's own floundering, though that is my inference from the sound. The underlying beat is a fairly steady iambic pentameter, which Clare roughens whenever he likes. The final line, "And little feel boys oer their heads can stray", has twisted word order that makes you stop and untangle it. As printed here, spellings like "Untill", "beesom", "Een" and "oer" keep the poem close to speech.
Much of the poem is about how snow rewrites a landscape. The shepherd walks valleys he knows well, yet "new sensations his old memory fills". The hedges he left at night are "no more descried", and in their place is "one white sweep of curving hills". Hedges are what divide a field from the next, and with them gone the land becomes smooth and continuous. Trees are "turned bushes", their bodies half hidden, as though the snow were swallowing them gradually.
The boy's section turns that strangeness into play. He "Walks oer the gate he opened yesternight", and the tree tops are now low enough for sheep to nibble. Clare tracks his courage in small steps: "cautious steps", then "bolder shuffles", then the sudden "down he drops and plunges to the chin". The verb "drops" echoes the "tempest drops" earlier, so the wind and the boy fall in the same word. He escapes, "Then turns and laughs but dare not further go". The laugh and the caution sit side by side, and that is exactly how a child behaves at the edge of something thrilling.
The last move is the poem's most interesting one. Having followed the boy down into the drift, Clare keeps going below it: "deep the grass and bushes lie below, / Where little birds that soon at eve went in / With heads tucked in their wings now pine for day." The poem doesn't moralise or tell us the boy is in the wrong. It simply lets us see that the same snow is a playground on top and a shut-in darkness underneath. The birds "little feel" what passes over them, and the boy knows nothing of them either. Each is unaware of the other's world.
That quiet attention to creatures and ordinary people, rather than to grand scenes, is what makes the poem worth reading. Clare is remembered as a poet of the English countryside, and here he shows weather as a force that changes how everyone sees: the adult through memory, the child through delight, the birds through waiting. The poem moves steadily downward, from the roaring sky to the window, the doorstep, the drift and finally the hidden hedge, and it ends on what a snowfall covers, not on what it reveals.