Sunday Dip by John Clare (1800s): a group of village boys spend their Sunday swimming, ducking and floating on a raft of rushes, watched by the poet.
Clare's rural childhood and nature poetry, the fourteen lines of rhyming couplets, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'The morning road is thronged with merry boys', 'Who seek the water for their Sunday joys', 'The boldest ventures first and dashes in', 'And others go and follow to the chin', 'And duck about, and try to lose their fears', 'And laugh to hear the thunder in their ears', 'They bundle up the rushes for a boat', 'The awkward load will scarcely bear them up', 'And play about the water half the day'.
Form: fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, with many lines beginning 'And' to keep the action running on.
Structure: one continuous scene told by an onlooker in the present tense, from the crowd on the road, to the boldest boy's dive, to the raft and a whole afternoon of play.
Context: Clare (1793 to 1864), the son of a farm labourer in Helpston, known as the 'Northamptonshire Peasant Poet', who wrote about nature and rural childhood and often used sonnets and rhyming couplets; the anthology dates the poem only to the 1800s.
Compares well with I Remember, I Remember (the joys of childhood), To My Sister (a free day in nature) and Peckham Rye Lane (a lively place and its people, seen by an onlooker).
