The Thrush's Nest
by John Clare

English poet. His first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was printed by Keats' publishers Taylor and Hessey in 1820. It sold well, and Clare was presented as a 'ploughman poet' in the mould of Burns or Robert Bloomfield. His next book The Village Minstrel, appeared the following year, but The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), The Rural Muse (1835) took much longer to write and did not sell. His poetry was neglected in the nineteenth century, but he is now firmly established as one of the major poets of the Romantic school, which included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron.

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The Thrush's Nest
by John Clare

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

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The Thrush's Nest by John Clare