The horse will set his foot and bite
Close to the ground lark’s guarded nest
And snort to meet the prickly sight;
He fans the feathers of her breast—
Yet thistles prick so deep that he
Turns back and leaves her dwelling free.
We have only to compare the detail of Clare’s work with the sonorous generalisations in, say, Thomson’s Seasons—which he admired—to realise the immense gulf that divides Clare from his eighteenth-century predecessors. Clare, indeed, is more like a twentieth-century than an eighteenth-century poet. He is almost more like a twentieth-century than a nineteenth-century poet. He is “neo-Georgian” in his preference for the fact in itself above the image or the phrase. The thing itself is all the image he asks, and Mr. W. H. Davies in his simplest mood might have made the same confession of faith as Clare:
I love the verse that mild and bland
Breathes of green fields and open sky,
I love the muse that in her hand