Summer

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,    For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,    And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,    And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast;    She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,    And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair;    I will look upon her face,

I will in her beauty rest,    And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.    The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,   The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,   And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest   In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's breast;   I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her ear   That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my dear;   I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away   Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.

Form: aabbccdd 1.

This belongs to the group of poems written while Clare was confined in the Northampton County Asylum from 1842 until his death in 1864.