Summary
“The Yellowhammer’s Nest” begins in a highly specific place and moment. The speaker sees a bird flying up past a “wooden brig,” or a large ship. It has been frightened by a cowboy, who was scrambling down into the brambles to harvest berries. Seeing the bird taking flight, the speaker realizes that the bird's nest will be abandoned, and urges his companion to come with him to look for the nest.
The nest is beside a shallow stream, whose water sings as it flows over a bed of pebbles. Beside the bank, the speaker finds the nest, tucked beneath a patch of dry and spindly grass. The nest itself is messy, not the product of careful design, but rather patched together from whatever the yellowhammer could find. Because the yellowhammer lives in the countryside, it is made from twigs leftover from last year’s harvest, and lined with hairs shed by horses.
Then the speaker turns his attention from the nest to the eggs it holds. They are covered with squiggling black lines that resemble writing. He describes these lines as the yellowhammer’s poetry, noting that she lives in a place as beautiful and poetic as Castalay (a spring and home to water nymphs in Greek mythology) while her partner sings upon a little hill of dirt that seems to the speaker akin to Parnassus (the home of the muses).
Having seen the idyllic place the yellowhammer calls home, the speaker urges his companion to leave them to their happy home. Yet he then acknowledges that even in this sweet place, all is not well. “Ill,” or misfortune, can arrive at any moment in the form of a snake, who may watch the nest and devour the eggs, leaving a ruined nest and a heartbroken bird.
Analysis
“The Yellowhammer’s Nest” is a deceptively simple poem. At its core, it is a straightforward description of a small detail of the English countryside. However, Clare makes that description special through his extraordinary attention to detail, his invocation of multiple complex and contradictory emotions, and his emphasis on the relationship between natural beauty and poetry.
We see Clare’s attention to detail in his description of the nest itself. It’d be easy to say something generic about a nest made of twigs and lined with soft down. Clare instead identifies the particular twigs the yellowhammer uses as hay left behind after the harvest, and similarly sees that the down lining the nest is hair shed by horses. The observations bring us closer to the nest, encouraging the reader to imagine themself inhabiting this particular instant with this particular nest, rather than simply picturing a general image of a bird’s nest, or even one we remember seeing in our own memories.
Furthermore, the details of what makes up the bird’s nest emphasize its place in the broader countryside. The yellowhammer’s home is diminutive, tucked beneath grass beside a stream “scarcely deep enough a bee to drown.” Later in the poem, Clare describes this tiny paradise almost like another world, with its own miniature mountains and springs. Yet he never lets us imagine that the yellowhammer’s life is completely independent of our own, because its nest is made of the materials left behind by farming.
The ending of the poem similarly emphasizes the yellowhammer’s place in the broader world. Clare writes, “in the sweetest places cometh ill,” articulating a universal rule of life on earth: there is suffering everywhere. Even the tiny paradise where the yellowhammer dwells is part of that everywhere. Despite this more general focus, the poem remains grounded in the reality of the yellowhammer’s life. Its principal predator is the snake, who coils up and watches the nest, waiting to strike until the mother is absent—as she is in this moment.
In “John Clare and Biopolitics,” the critic Chris Washington emphasizes that here Clare does not present the snake’s appetite for the warbler’s young as a normal part of the natural world. Instead, he sees the incident from the bird’s perspective, and understands the death of its young as an extraordinary tragedy, and the snake as a villain. As a farmer, Clare would have known that the natural world depends on predation and violence to keep going. Yet in this poem, although he acknowledges that death and disease are universal parts of life, he also presents them as something to mourn, even when the victims are “only” tiny songbirds.
In this sense, then, Clare humanizes the songbird, by granting it the emotional depth and interiority we usually reserve for human characters. He similarly sees the world from the bird’s perspective when he describes the yellowhammer as a poet, in lines 13 through 19. This is the most typically Romantic section of the poem, in that it engages elements of fantasy to elevate the natural world from an ordinary place to somewhere more epic and significant. Clare was often dismissive of this tendency among his contemporaries: he felt that the inclusion of mythological figures signaled a failure to pay attention to the natural world as it really was.
Clare, then, refers to the mythological locations of Castalay and Parnassus without directly bringing them into his poem. Instead, he stresses that to the little songbird, the “brooks and flowery weeds” seem akin to Castalay, where nymphs frolicked in Greek mythology. Similarly, the “old molehill” where her partner sings seems like Parnassus, the mythical home of the muses. In another poem, these comparisons might mock the small scale of the warbler’s world. Clare, however, stoops to the level of the bird, seeing the world from their perspective. When the speaker recounts that the weeds “seem” “as sweet as Castaly” and the “old molehill” is “like as Parnass’ hill,” he leaves ambiguous whether they seem that way only to the bird, or to the speaker as well. Indeed, Clare’s decision to describe this same bank as one of the “sweetest places” in the world suggests that speaker and bird both see it as the rival of a vaster landscape.
By describing the bird as a poet, Clare creates an even more profound parallel between himself and his warbling subject. Many of the poems Clare published alongside “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” employ extensive onomatopoeia, so that the sound of the poem reinforces its meaning. This focus on the sounds of language aligns the poet with the bird, whose song is similarly a string of noises. Although Clare does not employ this device here, he does attempt to use language to draw the reader into the landscape, as though they were really there. From the first few lines, the speaker employs first person plural, “let us stoop,” inviting us to see the world at his side as though we were really there. The suggestion is that by listening to Clare’s poem, we see the nest as he did, and enter into the poetry of nature that the yellowhammer and her partner helped to write with their eggs and their song.
