John Clare, the English poet best known for his writing about the countryside, opens this extract with a cry of simple pleasure: "Sweet solitude, what joy to be alone." For eight lines the mood holds. Butterflies are "glad," flowers "smile," and the sight of them would "soften hearts if they were hard as stone." Nature is presented here as a kind of moral force. The detail that keeps the scene from turning into a greeting card is the bees "with coal black faces," a close, slightly comic observation that comes from long looking. Solitude is also defined by what it lacks: a place "where not the voice of man our pleasure mars." The second stanza answers that line by bringing in another voice.
That voice is the wind. "A voice is speaking; hark, it louder calls." The speaker cannot understand it, and the sound grows from a "hum" to something that "loudly squalls," a verb that suggests both a storm and a wailing child. Then comes the hush before the thunder. The fern leaves "scarcely shake" and the tottergrass, a name that makes the plant sound unsteady on its feet, "scarcely stirs at all." The repeated "scarcely" slows the lines like a held breath. The stanza then breaks out of its pattern. The rhymes on "shake," "awake" and "break" cluster in the last three lines, and the stanza runs to nine lines where the first had eight, so the lightning seems to spill past the space made for it.
The third stanza turns the sky into something from the farmyard. The clouds become a "mackerel sky" and "woolpacks," and then the dusk looks like "sheep ointment" daubed on the heavens. These comparisons are practical and unglamorous, the images of someone who knows sheep and fish when he sees them. Their cheerfulness drains away as the stanza moves on. The sky is "dead-hued," then "as a corpse's eye," and the colours end in "leaden hues of desolation." The last line is the longest in the stanza, twelve syllables where ten is the norm, and it stretches out as if the light were slowly trailing off: "fade away."
Gold, then, has given way to lead. In the final stanza the dandelion tries to bring the gold back. The flowers shine "like guineas," and "we almost think they are gold as we pass." That "almost" is honest. The flower is only counterfeit treasure, and the poem has already shown how quickly brightness goes. The image of "fallen stars in a green sea of grass" echoes the "flowers like stars" of the first stanza, but the stars have now fallen. The dandelions close "like painter's brush when even was," and the stanza ends with them turning "to nothing else but down" while "the rude winds blow off each shadowy crown." The crown is a sharp choice of word. The flower that looked like royal gold is stripped of its dignity by the same wind that frightened us earlier.
Formally, the extract keeps a steady, mostly ten-syllable line and a firm rhyme scheme, but it will not stay still. The opening stanza rhymes neatly ABAB, CDCD. The later stanzas grow to nine lines and lean on repeated rhymes (in the third, "sky" appears three times as a rhyme word and "away" and "grey" close the stanza). The extract also jumps between moments, from a bright dell to a stormy afternoon to an April evening to a day in May, which suits the loose, excited sound of the word "rhapsody."
The significance of the piece lies in the way it refuses to separate beauty from loss. A reader might expect a poem that begins with "sweet solitude" to stay sweet. Clare lets in the storm, the corpse-like dusk and the blown-away seedhead, and he does it with the same affectionate attention he gave the bees' black faces. His nature is not a backdrop for soothing thoughts. It is lovely and changeable, and the poem suggests that gold is always on its way to becoming down.