Three men, one old dog and a single exhausted fox: John Clare turns a scrap of country life into a chase that is part brutal, part comic. In the last line he tips the sympathy, without comment, towards the animal.
The first fourteen lines show what the fox is up against. Found "weary" in the bushes, he is beaten out, and the two men's attitudes to him are very different. The ploughman "laughed and would have ploughed him in," treating the fox as a joke, or something to bury. The shepherd, more practical, "took him for the skin," seeing only the pelt's value. Neither sees a living creature, and the beating that follows, "till his ribs would crack," is told flatly. Then comes the turn. The shepherd slings the apparently dead fox over his back, and the fox "started from his dead disguise." The phrase is neat. Death becomes a costume that can be put on and thrown off, and the dog, not the men, is the one "surprised." The fox escapes with a snap and a bolt "through the hedge."
The form does a lot of the storytelling. Each stanza runs to fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but Clare rhymes them in couplets (nigh/high, shout/out, dead/bled). The lines are mostly end-stopped and built from short, plain verbs: *ran, beat, slung, snapt, bolted, threw*. Each pair of lines closes on one action, like a trap snapping shut, and the pace never lets up. The rhythm is steady and conversational, closer to a story told by a fire than to a nature lyric.
The second stanza turns the chase into a cumulative, almost slapstick sequence. Each pursuer reaches for whatever his work has put in his hands. The shepherd throws his hook and "tottered past," a small joke at the expense of his age. The ploughman only "wished he had a gun." The woodman, who first just "wondered at the fray," hurls his hatchet, but "the fox was bye." Clare's spelling of *by* makes the word sound like something whizzing past. Tools of daily labour become missiles, and the result is loss: "The shepherd broke his hook and lost the skin." The men end up poorer, and the fox has only to find a badger hole.
Clare also ties the two stanzas together through rhyme. The pair *in / skin* closes the ploughman and shepherd's cruelty in the first stanza, and it returns in the second in reverse order: "lost the skin" and "bolted in." The ploughman wanted to plough the fox *in* to the earth, and the fox ends up *in* the earth by his own choice. The pelt the shepherd wanted is the pelt he fails to get. The repeated rhymes make the chase feel circular, as if the men are running round in the same words as well as the same field.
The final couplet gives the poem its edge. "He lived to chase the hounds another day" reverses the expected picture, in which hounds chase foxes. The line also contains a warning, because "another day" admits that this victory is only temporary. The poem is also full of age. We meet an "old shepherd," an "old dog" and an "old fox," and the fox wins through experience and cunning, not through strength.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains. Clare never calls the men villains or the fox noble. The men are cruel in the first stanza and foolish in the second, and the fox is simply a creature who refuses to die on cue. The sympathy comes from the structure: the beating is told in a flat voice, the escape in a quick one, and the hunters are left with a broken hook and nothing to show. Clare was a poet who knew the working countryside, and the poem reads like something seen in a field, where nature is a tangle of hunger, work and survival and not a pretty backdrop.