A turkey is an unlikely subject for a poem, and John Clare doesn't dress it up. He watches it, and the watching is the point. In twelve lines he catches a bird at its most bad-tempered and most comic, one that sees off boys and a dog alike and is left in possession of the field. Clare was born in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston and wrote all his life about the countryside he knew, and the poem has the feel of something seen rather than imagined.
It moves in two beats. The first four lines are almost domestic. The turkeys "wade the close to catch the bees," slip away to lay, and "bring a brood of chelping chickens home." The verbs pile up on "and" ("lay away and breed and come / And bring"), so that a whole season passes in one unhurried breath. "Wade" is a good choice. It makes the long grass of the enclosed field feel like water rising round the birds' legs. Then, at line 5, a single "turkey" takes over, and from the gobbling it sounds like a male. The gentle chain of verbs turns into a series of displays: he "gobbles loud," "struts and sprunts his tail," and lets his wing "drag / His wing on ground." The bird stops being part of the farm's quiet routine and becomes a performer, and a menace.
Much of the poem's life comes from Clare's dialect words: "chelping," "sprunts," "huzzing," "nauntles." You don't need a glossary to feel them. Judging by context, "chelping" is the cheeping of chicks, "huzzing" a buzzing or rasping noise, and "nauntles" some kind of harassing of passers-by. Even if you can't pin down each meaning, the sounds do the work. "Makes a huzzing noise" hums with its z and s, and "gobbles" is the turkey's own cry turned into a verb. The vocabulary belongs to the people who actually lived alongside these birds, and that gives the poem its authority.
The form is a run of six rhymed couplets in lines of about ten syllables, the kind of tidy, balanced verse often used for more formal subjects. Set against a bad-tempered farmyard bird, it is faintly comic, though Clare never winks. The rhythm stays loose and speech-like, and sentences spill over line endings: "lets drag / His wing," "drives the boys / And bounces up." The bounce is felt in "And bounces up and flies at passer-bye," where the line seems to lift off with the bird.
Repetition shapes the poem too. "Gobbles loud" and "drives the boys" appear twice, and "passer-bye" is used twice as well, once as the victim of the turkey's "nauntling" and once as the target of its flying attack. Together with the earlier "often," this suggests a habit rather than a single incident. The turkey does this every day, and the poem's present tense keeps the scene going.
The two groups who might stop him are both beaten. The dog "snaps and grins nor ventures nigh." The word "grins" is perfect, because the dog shows its teeth in bravado while keeping a safe distance. The rhyme of "passer-bye" with "nigh" sets the bird's boldness against the dog's caution. The boys do better, at least in effort: "They throw their sticks and kick and run away." The line is a string of quick, clipped actions, and it ends on "away." The humans lose. There is no moral and no neat conclusion, and the poem stops as the boys leave, with the turkey still holding the ground.
That refusal to tidy things up is part of what makes the poem worth reading. Clare doesn't turn the turkey into a symbol or ask us to feel anything in particular about it. He gives it close attention and the language of the place it lives, and he lets it be funny and fierce on its own terms. A reader comes away with a sharper sense of how an ordinary animal behaves, and perhaps with some sympathy for the dog.