Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

          

                                                                        Denise Coble

Emmonsail's Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motion swing
On the half-rotten ash-tree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed.
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn
And for the haw round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels, twenty in a drove,
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

John Clare 

 Clare is such a treat for word-lovers. He works beyond mere description and sense to give us something I can only think to call texture. Every word in this poem jumps and jostles against the others, is alive with meaning and sound - very like birds on a branch. He makes it look easy, but my gosh, it is not. He is nothing short of a master. Very few people can write an excellent poem, even fewer can write a poem that flies off the page. 

 

Heath: a broad area of level or rolling treeless country

Brake: rough or marshy land overgrown usually with one kind of plant

Furze: gorse, a bushy plant

Ling: heather

Brig: bridge

Quagmire: marsh

Haw = hawthorn or fruit of the hawthorn

Closen rove: an enclosed field?

Bumbarrel: a longtailed tit

Drove: a flock