Poems about small summer creatures usually come with a lesson attached: the busy bee, the thrifty ant. John Clare's insects teach nothing of the kind. They loiter, play and fall asleep, and the poem's central idea is that this idleness is their charm. Their lives are so carefree that a human watcher can only explain them by promoting them first to royalty and then to fairies.
The opening word choices set this up. "Loiterers" is a word for people hanging about with nothing to do, yet here the loiterers sit on the delicate "barley's beard." Then comes the odd phrase "happy units of a numerous herd." "Units" sounds like a tally, "herd" like cattle, and both are made tender by "happy" and "playfellows." The insects are countless, yet each one seems to enjoy itself. The flat statement "No kin they bear to labour's drudgery" is the poem's sharpest line. Clare grew up in rural Northamptonshire and worked on the land, so it is tempting to hear a little envy in it, though that is an inference from the text and not a fact the poem states.
The form suits the subject. The poem runs to eleven rhymed couplets in loose iambic pentameter, and the neat pairs of lines give it a skipping, toy-box tidiness. Clare is relaxed about the rules. "Fly" is paired with "drudgery" in a rhyme that only half works, and "wings" and "fly" each turn up as a rhyme word twice. The syntax is sometimes inverted ("the laughing Summer brings") and sometimes compressed, as in "Till night goes sleep." Two dashes ("no one knows--", "feed them not--") give the voice a quiet, conversational hesitation, as if the speaker were thinking aloud.
The imagery is built from rich fabrics and rich rooms. The rose has "velvet," the heath bell a "silken hood," and the insects have "silken beds and roomy painted hall." Flowers become furniture and architecture, and the insects' small scale is turned into luxury. They sleep "like to princes," wear "coloured hoods and richly burnished wings," and pass their days in a "Sunday dress," so that every day for them is a holiday. The diet is imagined in the same spirit. "The dew-drops feed them not," says the speaker, and the sun "may bring them golden wine." The insects drink light, and the line "where they fly for dinner no one knows" admits honestly that the observer cannot see everything.
That admission leads into the final movement. "One almost fancies" is a cautious phrase. The speaker does not claim that the insects are fairies, only that their glitter, their pranks and their disappearances make the idea tempting. The fairy "masquerade" is a neat final image, because a masquerade is a party in which everyone is dressed up and hiding. The insects are "disguised, as if of mortal folk afraid," and so the unexplained gaps in their lives, such as where they eat and where they go, become deliberate secrets. There is a quiet irony in the last line as well. Earlier the insects "mock the sunshine" in their wings, but now they must beware "glaring day." Ordinary, bright, watching daylight, which stands for the human gaze, is the one thing that might spoil the magic. The poem tries not to spoil it, and it stops short of explaining.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. It pays close attention to creatures most people would swat away, and it does so without condescension or moralising. Clare does not turn the insects into symbols of human virtue, and he does not pretend to know more than he sees. Instead he lets the scale of the world tilt, so that a rose is a palace and a bell-flower a bedroom. The result is an exact, affectionate sense of wonder, and a reminder that observing a small thing closely can make it seem larger and stranger than it first appeared.