Three times John Clare tells us the same thing, and each time it lands a little harder: "Now is past." The phrase opens the first two stanzas and closes all three. It is a strange sentence, because "now" is the word that is supposed to mean the present. Clare makes it something already lost. The "happy now" of the opening belongs to a vanished time, and the speaker is left in a present that has no name of its own, only the refrain announcing that the good one ended.
The story is slight. A man remembers walking in the woods with a woman who is no longer there. She stays unnamed for most of the poem, a "her" whose shadow stretches below the hazel bough, a pair of lips compared to wild strawberries. Her name arrives only in the penultimate line, and then as an absence: "No Adelaide walks the wood rides." We meet her at the moment we learn she is gone.
What the poem explores is how closely love and landscape are bound together, and what happens when the landscape stops cooperating. In the first stanza "Nature said we loved", so nature acts as witness, almost a priest at the wedding. Afterwards the weather takes over the feelings. Winter "crept between" the lovers, and its frosts "withered all the green" and "froze the beating heart". The slightly rough grammar of "have froze" sounds like speech rather than polish, which suits a grief that has no interest in ornament. The tree limbs tell the story too. The couple walk beneath an "oak-tree bough" and then a "hazel bough", and in the second stanza autumn "stained and blighted every bough". Same word, ruined shelter.
The finest image is the shift from lips to berries to hips. Wild strawberries "like her lips" have left the moss, and "Her bloom's upon the hips." The red passes from mouth to fruit to the rosehip of late summer, and blossom has quietly become seed and decay. The comparison is physical and tender, yet it is already an autumn comparison. By the last stanza even the berries are beyond reach: "Wild strawberries which both gathered then, / None know now where they grew." The loss is not only that she has gone but that the shared place has slipped out of memory. Judging by the imagery, Clare knew his plants closely, and naming them makes the grief specific rather than vaguely "natural".
The form carries the mood. Each stanza runs four lines, a single short line, four more lines, and then the refrain. The longer lines alternate between four beats and three, a ballad-like sway that sounds gentle and almost songlike. The short fifth line then cuts in like a gust: "Winter's blast", "Autumn's blast". It rhymes with the closing "past", so every stanza is sealed by its own cold snap. The third stanza loosens this, because "blast" becomes "The skys oercast", a vaguer, flatter weather. It is as if the grief has outlasted any one season. The seasons themselves arrive out of calendar order, winter first and then autumn, which may suggest a mind circling back rather than moving on, though that is an inference from the text.
Sound does quiet work as well. Rhymes such as "lips" and "hips" and "wood sides" and "wood rides" are plain, almost folk-like, and "below" is repeated in the second stanza as if the speaker cannot stop looking down at the ground. The ending is the bleakest moment. The rhyme of "yellow" with "bed-fellow" sets the dying leaves beside a homely, faintly comic word, and the line that follows, "True love has no bed-fellow", sounds like a proverb. Its bluntness is the point, since the pastoral vocabulary has run out.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. Its materials are one refrain, a handful of countryside plants and three bleak weather reports, yet it shows a love that Nature once vouched for being quietly unwritten by Nature itself.