Welcome to March. This morning it's 12 below zero, with rain forecast for tomorrow night. Don't even try to explain this to me.

On the docket today, teenage driving test. As a result, hardly any breakfast was consumed. Poor boy. He's already failed test number 1, so both his pessimism and his parallel-parking nerves are cranked up to high.

So I'm copying out this little poem for my boy, which he won't read. But that's fine. Poems are for the people who need them. The poet, John Clare (1793-1864), has long been fixed with the label Minor Romantic Poet, which would make an amusing t-shirt or bumper-sticker slogan but is depressing as a sticky monicker for the ages. He was poorly educated and also crazy but was a remarkable observer of the natural world and captured what he saw in odd, compelling, but unevenly crafted poems. The sonnet below is somewhat unusual among 19th-century poems for being written as a single sentence. That's a style you often see in contemporary poems--a breathy rush that works to meld emotion, drama, and observed detail. But it wasn't so common when Clare was writing.

Schoolboys in Winter

John Clare

The schoolboys still their morning rambles take

To neighbouring village school with playing speed,

Loitering with pastimes' leisure till they quake,

Oft looking up the wild geese droves to heed,

Watching the letters which their journeys make,

Or plucking 'awes on which the fieldfares feed,

And hips and sloes--and on each shallow lake

Making glib slides where they like shadows go

Till some fresh pastimes in their minds awake

And off they start anew and hasty blow

Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow,

Then races with their shadows wildly run

That stride, huge giants, o'er the shining snow

In the pale splendour of the winter sun.