A man with a little spare time walks into the fields carrying a book. He shelters in a hovel, finishes the book within the hour, then lies on a molehill and reads "the day long," laughing aloud as he goes. To the people working nearby he is a strange sight. Strangers smile, and the ploughman stops mid-furrow to wonder "what being had come in his way." The poem is about the loneliness of being a reader, and a would-be poet, in a place where work is what people do. It also shows how a sensitive person answers incomprehension: first by shrugging it off, then by dreaming of fame.
The form feels as easygoing as the day it describes. There are five quatrains in rhyming couplets, and the lines bounce along on four beats with a lilting, triple-time step ("I WENT in the FIELDS with the LEIsure I GOT"). It sounds almost like a walking song. The rhymes are plain and cheerful: *shower/hour*, *away/stay*. But look at the ends of the last three stanzas. Each closes on the same pair, *long* and *song*. The repetition works like a refrain, and it also shows the poet's mind drifting toward what he wants. Every "day long" leads to a "song," and by the last stanza the song is the whole point.
The animals make up the poem's audience, and Clare ranks them with gentle humour. The bird "came for shelter, but soon flew away," a fair-weather listener. The horse is better company: he "stood up in quiet, and hung down his head, / And seemed to be hearing the poem I read." That "seemed" matters, because the poet knows he is flattering himself a little, and the joke is kind. The sky then fills with sound. The pewit tumbles and swoops, the raven croaks, and the lark "charmed me all the day long." The poet does not merely listen to the lark. He "joined in the chorus of song," so reading turns into singing, and he counts himself among the birds.
The raven carries a sting, since it croaks "like the ploughman ill-bred." The human neighbour is lined up with the harshest voice in the field. The title is also worth a second look. Nobody in the poem is obviously frightened, but the ploughman's "wonder" at a "being" lying on a molehill suggests the unease of someone faced with something he cannot place. Judging by the text, the title may be the poet's own wry version of that moment, the ploughman unnerved by a reader. The poet's reply, calling him "foolhardy" and saying "His praise was worth nothing, his censure was poor," is a little too tidy. If the man's opinion were really worthless, it would not need such neat balancing, and the defensiveness lets us see that the mockery hurt.
The last stanza gives the poem its twist. "Fame bade me go on" turns fame into a voice that encourages him, and the poet says he "toiled." That is a labourer's word, and he applies it to writing, claiming the ploughman's vocabulary for his own work. Then comes the final line: he will work "Till the fields where he lived should be known in my song." The revenge on the scorner is to make the scorner's land famous. It is a generous kind of triumph, since the poet's ambition never leaves the countryside, and his fame is tied to the soil he sits on.
That tie to place is what makes the poem worth reading. Clare was born into a farm-labouring family in Helpston, so the tension between field and book may well be personal, though the poem itself never says so. Either way, the viewpoint is rare. This is not a visitor admiring the country from outside. It is someone inside the working landscape, caught between belonging to it and wanting to put it into words. The simple rhythm hides a real mix of humility and pride, and a belief that a shared patch of ground can become poetry.