[In the following essay, Williams demonstrates how Clare uses poetic form, diction, and subject matter to overturn his readers' expectations of the picturesque in his poem "The Gypsies."]

The snow falls deep; the forest lies alone;
The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,
Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;
The gypsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
Beneath the oak which breaks away the wind,
And bushes close in snow like hovel warm;
There tainted mutton wastes upon the coals,
And the half-wasted dog squats close and rubs,
Then feels the heat too strong, and goes aloof;
He watches well but none a bit can spare,
And vainly waits the morsel thrown away.
'Tis thus they live—a picture to the place,
A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race.

The subtlety of John Clare's lyric, "Gypsies," may cause the reader to question the critical judgment of him as a poetic primitive, the douanier Rousseau of English Romanticism. The poem's grouping of gypsies huddled under winter trees might have won William Gilpin's enthusiasm and approval; but the lyric sets out to deny before it confirms its apparent esthetic context: the picturesque. In all but rhyme it is a sonnet, also, though one almost devoid of the resources common to the lyric—metaphor, symbol, overtly expressive language. And yet, through the poet's apparent esthetic of denial, this anti-lyric, anti-pastoral, anti-sonnet achieves in its spare lines the characteristic aim of most lyrics—the expression of powerful feelings, of empathy, of passion.

By the late eighteenth century, gypsies were a cliché of the picturesque, and of newly popular ballads. The eighteenth-century picturesque was a solidly middle-class, comfortable esthetic, an art of vistas rather than of interiors. The crumbling cottage with ragged children around the door is ideally picturesque from a distance; the filth inside is concealed. One first assumes that Clare's primary impulse is anti-picturesque, for descriptive details are surprisingly frank (the "squalid camp," "tainted mutton," and "half-wasted dog.") And so the conclusion is another jolt: "Tis thus they live—a picture to the place." This statement is at least partly ironic, but "Gypsies" is antipicturesque as Shakespeare's "When icicles hang by the wall" is anti-pastoral. Shivering chickens and chillblains are unexpected in city poetry about country life; yet the touches seem accurate because so keenly observed. Similarly, Clare flouts readers' expectations; these gypsies have no glamor or mystery, and their misery evokes pity rather than fascination.

Clare also teases expectations concerning genre. This poem is a modified sonnet. Its fourteen lines of extremely regular iambic pentameter are divided into a pattern of twelve lines of description closed and judged by a couplet. But Clare depends on substance, not rhyme, to create this shape, for there is only one rhyme in the entire poem. Thus the poem is recognized as a sonnet only in retrospect.

In the first twelve lines, the absence of strong formal outlines permits Clare to create a description that is "picturesque" in the original sense: "suitable for a picture." Compare the reading of this poem to the experience of looking at a painting. The present-tense description creates a sense of suspension and denies the pre-eminence of temporal process. These actors eternally inhabit one time and space. The imagery is almost entirely visual; the poet directs the eye from boy the man to dog, as the eye moves around a painting. Each remains a type, recognized but unknown in a more intimate sense. The characters remain merely figures in a landscape, and the speaker's objectivity suggests a detachment more readily associated with the plastic arts, which are denied the kinds of psychological insights central to literature. The painter can present emotions only through action or concrete symbols. So it is here: we enter a mind only once—the boy "thinks upon the fire and hurries back." Clare illustrates pervasive, unsatisfied hunger not in human thought or action, but by means of the waiting dog; an effective displacement, yet utterly impersonal and objective.

All the speaker's feelings and judgment, suppressed throughout the description, emerge in the final couplet, and with them comes a different kind of poetry: the lines rhyme, the syntax is inverted, the poet allows himself polysyllabic words and tightly organized alliterative patterns. This sudden, extravagant return to poetic resources suggests at first that the speaker has deserted or betrayed his gypsies. It is as if he had stepped back from the picture and flippantly dismissed the world he has created. (Given what is known of Clare, one might identify the motive for this movement as a fear of pain; empathy with outcasts is terrible, and must be avoided. The control and objectivity of the description, it seems, were a sort of repression which he now feels may fail, and so steps back even farther.)

Yet closer examination shows that pity and detachment are equally mixed in the couplet. The last line exemplifies the speaker's balance between sympathy and detachment (characterized in the poem by his tendency to place the gypsies in a "picture.") This final line also removes the poem from any sentimentality or romantic cliché; it is Clare's final surprise for the reader. The alliteration paradoxically emphasizes the understatement. "Pilfering" is petty thievery, and it suggests silent and trivial action (the "tainted mutton" may have a dubious provenance as well as a dubious smell). But the suspicion evoked by thievery is immediately countered by "unprotected." These gypsies are "vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods." Pro tection—a house—brings legal and social rights and responsibilities. But these gypsies have no shelter; thus their disregard for social conventions is not only understandable but inevitable.

The concluding rhyme gives a strong sense of closure and limitation; it defines the edges of the picture. The figures are set apart, subtly imprisoned. One may see the figures in the landscape painting as immortalized or as frozen, doomed to do the same thing forever; like the "men or gods" on the Grecian urn, Clare's gypsies are cold.