In longer poems, Clare uses the image of the nest as a place to situate his own secret identity as a poet. In 'The Robins Nest' it seems to be the speaker who is making a nest for himself, for the first sixty- seven lines at least; it is only then that the robin is mentioned (line 68). In a poem of a hundred and one lines, this is surely deliberate. The speaker's movement to an inner nesting place is set up in contrast to the troublesome world of man:

The later nest poems are some of Clare's best and depict everything that he finds captivating in the symbol of the solitary bird's nest: the eroticism of discovery, the penetration of entry, the womb-like image of being within a totally bounded world. The speaker's feeling of 'lone seclusion and a hermit joy' is a retreat from the encroaching territorial divisions of man; the smaller the world one occupies, the less likely it is to be divided, bordered, hedged or split by fencing. A microcosm can be a complete world: a bird's habitat is often represented as a small, independent ecosystem which seems to exist by and for itself. In 'Bumbarrels Nest' Clare seems to prefigure Hopkins in the use of sprung rhythm to express the 'inscape' of the bird's nest: "The oddling bush close sheltered hedge new plashed". In this poem the nest represents the female genitalia for Clare. The long-tailed tit ("bumbarrel" in Clare's dialect) creates a spherical nest with one small opening which is moistened with moss and spittle by the bird. Clare luxuriates inside the nest: "and warm and rich as feather bed within / With little hole on its contrary side". The use of the 't's ("Soft frittered & full soon the little lanes") creates a rhythmic friction which is accentuated by the taut rhythm of the poem. Thus Clare equates the safety and seclusion of the nest with sexual intercourse. Similarly, in 'The Nightingale's Nest', Clare uses imagery to describe the bird that overtly sexual:

Thus the bird's sexual delight in its song is the same as the poet's delight in his poetry and begins to show us what Clare is trying to do in these poems. The nightingale's song has become the poetry of her place as Clare's poetry is the poetry of Helpstone. To find the nightingale's nest we have to rummage around in thick, slimy undergrowth, before finally, and erotically, finding her "secret nest": "hunt this fern- strown thorn- clump round and round / And where this seeded woodgrass idly bows". Whilst a sexual reading is inevitable here, the reader also has to perform a psychological uncovering. Finding the nest also takes us deeper within the consciousness of the speaker, so that we journey to the acts and joys of childhood, and hide ourselves within the world of the poet as he is hiding himself within the nightingale's nest. Thus Clare is directing his audience towards a particular type of reading by which the poems must be gently and sympathetically interpreted, just as the speaker uncovers the nightingale's nest.

After his move to Northborough in 1832, Clare writes about nature in much more abstract terms. The land around him, levelled and regulated by enclosure, has become flat fen moorland rather than the rolling hills of Helpstone. Instead of being permanently linked to his natural surroundings as he was at Helpstone, he becomes a stranger, concentrating far more on themes of isolation. Alongside this movement, strange things begin to happen to Clare's verse. He uses much less local dialect after this time, reminding him as it does of his abandoned home. The only time dialect continues to be used is in poems like 'Rememberances' where he is looking back to his past at Helpstone. More complex is the decision Clare made to stop using dashes in his work after 1832. It is well documented that Clare rarely used punctuation, preferring to let his verse wander, as he did, unfettered by poetic convention. However, in all his early poetry he uses dashes which allow the reader to take time over his poetry and give a leisurely pace to his work. After 1832 the dashes disappear entirely, replaced by the more taut and strict sonnet form. Once again, the dashes are only used when he is remembering his happy youth at Helpstone. This strange phenomenon serves to highlight the growing claustrophobia of the poet: a "stranger in a strange land".