What is John Clare's 'The Flood' about?What is the meaning of this flood description? It seems so hard to understand with no proper syntax...

Broadly speaking, the answer's in the title: it's about a flood,
witnessed by the poet's speaker as he stands on 'Lolham Briggs', a viaduct bridge in Clare's
native Northamptonshire, crossing the flood plain of the River Welland. Clare describes the power
of the flood in three stanzas, each of them a sonnet, the tight organisation of the sonnet form
providing a tension with the awesome and uncontainable power of the flood
itself.

The lack of formal syntax, common in Clare, means that the
reader has to supply the 'sense units' to infer meanings, but the ambiguity is often fruitful. In
the opening lines, for example, 'in wild and lonely mood' could refer either forward to the
speaker, or backwards to the setting on Lolham Briggs.

In the first
stanza, the poet watches as the flood beats against the arches of the bridge below. Both the
bridge and the flood itself are lightly personified: the bridge 'breasted raving waves', as it
withstands the terrifying power with a 'shudder'. Description dominates over any implied meaning
until the last line of the stanza, where Clare draws a comparison between the movement of the
water (at one moment distinct eddies, at the next 'engulphed' in the general motion), and human
life, inexorably swallowed up by death.

The syntactical ambiguity
continues in the second stanza, as the 'wrecky stains' could apply either to the eddies of
earth-stained flood water, or to death itself. This verse continues the description with a more
minute focus, observing things like straws and feathers floating, turning and being borne away on
the stream, 'seeming as faireys whisked [them] from the view.' By the end of the stanza, more
substantial things ripped down by the storm - 'bushes, fence demolished rails' - are seen 'loaded
with weeds', like 'water monsters'.

In the third stanza, as at the
end of the second, the rolling motion of the flood water is captured through the mid-line breaks:
'Waves trough - rebound - and fury boil again'; then Clare visualises the relentless movement of
the water on towards the ocean - 'like trouble wandering to eternity'. Unlike most Romantic
poets, Clare does not habitually use nature as a reflection of spriritual states, or of the mind
and heart of the poet - his presence in the poem is as perceiver only. But that perception is
minutely vivid and evocative: from the intriguingly onomatopoeic 'huzzing sea', to compound words
like 'waterstrife' and the ineffably mysterious and alliterative 'strange birds like snow spots',
which 'hang where the wild duck hurried past and fled'.