Autumn (John Clare poem) Literary Elements

First-person plural (see line 10). The personality of the speaker is largely absent from the poem, although we see the autumnal landscape through their perspective, which is clearly informed by domestic country life.

The form is three stanzas of four lines each, written in an aabb rhyme scheme. The meter is iambic hexameter, or six pairs of one unstressed and one stressed syllable.

Line 3: Clare uses simile to compare a boiling hot spring to a boiling pot, "The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot."
Line 5: Clare uses simile to compare the cracked and dried up ground to overbaked bread, "The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread."
Line 7: Clare uses simile to compare the hard surface of the fields glittering in the sun to the appearance of water, "The fallow fields glitter like water indeed."
Line 9: Clare uses simile to compare the appearance of the hill-tops in the sun to iron in a furnace, "Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun."
Line 10: Clare uses metaphor to compare the appearance of the river in the sunlight to a river of melted gold, "And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run."
Line 11: Clare uses metaphor to compare the sun-filled light to liquid gold, "liquid gold is the air."

Line 2, alliteration of /g/, "on the green grass"
Lines 3-4, alliteration of /b/, "boils like a pot...bubbles red-hot"
Line 6, alliteration of /d/, "dried up and dead"
Line 7, alliteration of /f/, "fallow fields"

In the second stanza, the fallow fields appear like shimmering water because they are so dry that their hard surfaces reflect the sunlight.

Peasant poetry, lyric

The English countryside

The first stanza is playful and emotionally distant, the second is melancholy, and the third is full of awe.

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The poem's major conflict is between the beauty of the autumn and its harshness as the period where things begin to die.

The climax comes in the third stanza, where the speaker encounters the autumnal landscape as sublime, despite recognizing its similarity to his everyday life, as well as the tragedy and melancholy of the season.

The hot spring in the first stanza foreshadows the final stanza's emphasizes on the burning heat of the sun. Similarly, the sun's power to make the dry and empty fallow fields appear like glittering water foreshadows the sunlight's transformation of the whole landscape into gold in the final stanza.

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In the second line, Clare personifies the thistledown by describing it lying down and climbing a hill.

The final stanza exaggerates the golden appearance of the sunlight.

The sound of the word "bubbles" in the fourth line echoes the popping sound of bubbles themselves.