NOTES

Introduction

p. 15Cf. Russell Brain: Some Reflections on Genius, 1960. Lord Brain concluded that Clare was not schizophrenic, but suffering from a manic-depressive (circular) psychosis: this would be consistent with the ‘sanity’ of his poetry and the alienations of his conversations and letters.
p. 20 These quotations are from William James: ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’.
p. 22 Seamus Heaney’s observations are from his essay ‘In the Country of Convention’, Preoccupations, Faber, 1980.

The Poems Sources of Texts

Days and Seasons: all texts newly transcribed from Peterborough MSS A40, A41, A43, A45 and A54, collated with The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibble and R. K. R. Thornton (MidNag/Carcanet), 1979 (in these notes, MC), and with The Rural Muse, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (MidNag/ Carcanet), 1982 (RM); except for ‘Summer Evening’ and ‘Crows in Spring’, which come from Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds., Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, Oxford University Press, 1967 (R S), a transcript of texts from various Northampton and Peterborough MSS. In the case of a few words, I have preferred the R S variant to that in M S A54.
Landscapes with Figures: all texts newly transcribed from MSS as above, except for ‘A Sunday with Shepherds and Herdboys’, and ‘Snow Storm’, which come from RS.
Birds and Beasts: all texts transcribed from MSS as above, except for ‘To the Snipe’, ‘The Martin’, ‘The Hedgehog’, ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Badger’, from R S.
Loves: all texts from MSS as above, except for ‘Dedication to Mary’ and ‘I’ve ran the furlongs . . .’ (RS).
Changes and Contradictions: all texts transcribed from M S S as above, except for ‘The Mores’ (R S) and ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, from E. Robinson and D. Powell, John Clare, Oxford University Press, 1984 (R P).
 
Madhouses ... : all texts transcribed from Northampton MSS 6, 8, 9, 10, 19 and 20, Peterborough MS A 62, and Bodleian MS Don. A 64, except for the first three poems, which appeared in the English Journal, May 1841.
 
The English Bastille: all texts transcribed from Knight’s transcripts, Peterborough MSD 24, and from MSS6, 9, 10 and 19, as above; except for ‘And only o’er the heaths . . .’and ‘I look on the past . . .’ which were published in the USA in June 1937.
p. 31 Clare used the sonnet-form throughout his life. In his early sonnets he is an invisible spectator, watching and listening; in the prospect, he blends both near and far, animating the landscape with movements of birds, animals and representative humans. Many of these sonnets end with a brief evaluation, an affirmation of positive satisfactions.
p. 32 The Wheat Ripening: Clare’s models for his earlier poetry derive from eighteenth-century topographical poetry: the marks of ‘literariness’ can be detected in ‘What time the . . .’, ‘maiden’, ‘list’ the clown’, ‘lark’s ditty’: this is clearly not the language of his village neighbours.
p. 33 A Morning Walk: throughout 1831 and 1832 Clare wrote out a fair copy of the poems that he wished to include in a projected volume, The Midsummer Cushion: his proposal to publish this by subscription failed, and some of the contents of the manuscript were selected, modified, edited and cleaned up by other hands to form The Rural Muse, 1835. Since the poems in the Midsummer Cushion manuscript (Peterborough, MS A 54) comprise much of Clare’s own presentation of his early maturity (poems written through the 1820s and early 1830s, his age being twenty-seven to thirty-nine), I have chosen most of the poems of the pre-asylum years from this source.
p. 34 Allnightly things are on the run: MC reads ‘on the rout’, but the rhyme-scheme requires ‘run’.
p. 38 some wild mysterious book: many chapbooks offered ways of telling fortunes.
p. 39 Or list’ the church-clock’s humming sound: MC reads ‘Or watch . . .’
p. 40 Strength to ferry: at the beginning of this line, the preposition, for, is understood.
p. 45 Evening Pastime: Clare was a voracious reader throughout his life. Here he instances two poets who influenced his early work: Thomson, whose Seasons was the most popular and influential poem of the eighteenth century, and Cowper, whose quiet voice Clare loved. Bloomfield’s case was specially interesting to Clare, for the older poet also came out of the lower strata of English society: his poetry sold very well for a time, and many genteel readers took a patronizing interest in him; he turned his back on his own culture, dismissing it as vulgar, and died after suffering severe melancholy and poverty.
p. 52 Sport in the Meadows: working to establish a poetic language, Clare sometimes went astray: here he has become infatuated with the -en ending, which for late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century readers offered a sense of the antique: Chatterton used dozens of such devices in his forgeries, and the strongest model for such tricks was probably Spenser.
p. 55 Tuteling: i.e. Tootling. MC reads ‘Tutting’.
p. 65 To see the startled frog his rout pursue: ‘rout’ is used by Clare to signify either ‘route’ or ‘path’, or ‘lively activity’, or both.
p. 66 And swallows heed: i.e., and I heed swallows . . . as is their custom, rising first.
p. 67 And wind-enarmourd aspin: the best appreciation and analysis of Clare’s language is Barbara M. H. Strang’s essay, ‘John Clare’s Language’, published as an appendix to RM. Of ‘enarmourd’ she writes, ‘Enarmoured surely “contains” enamoured, but . . . appears in contexts in which the image of armour is also appropriate . . .’ Cf. p. 51, first line.
As wonting: ‘wonting’ or ‘wanting’? Either/or? Or both/ and? As Barbara Strang remarks, ‘It is not the editor’s business to preclude the reader from perceiving these double images.’
p. 72 but where is pleasure gone?: sporadically, even in relatively early poems, Clare surprises his reader with a sudden and unexpected inrush of bleakness, melancholy or disenchantment.
p. 74 While hasty hare: MC reads ‘tasty’.
Emmonsails Heath: otherwise known as Ailsworth Heath, and now a nature-reserve. This is the heath that Clare crossed when, as a boy, he went off in search of the edge of the world.
p. 75 Lolham Brigs: or Bridges. A splendid series of stone arches carries the old Roman road across the flood-plain on either side of the River Welland.
p. 80 Waving the sketching pencil: MC reads ‘sketchy’.
p. 82 Displaying ... at all: this runs fairly close to the kinds of ‘proper’ sentiments that his patrons, especially Admiral Lord Radstock, urged him to express.
Stray Walks: the affirmation of the value of ‘wandering’, and of the serendipitously educative powers of nature that accrue to the wanderer — this occurs frequently in Clare, as in Wordsworth. The contrary values of constraint and calculation were neatly satirized by both Wordsworth (Prelude, Book 5) and Byron {DonJuan,Canto I, stanzas XVI and L). Clare’s commitment to wandering also appears in the next poem in this selection.
p. 93 A Sunday with Shepherds and Herdboys: the oral culture of the shepherds was for Clare a great treasure; in this poem he establishes a contrast between the claims of the Bible and those of traditional romances. At this juncture Clare himself is ambivalent: on the one hand he characterizes the tellers of tales as ‘ignorant’; on the other, he invests such tales with the accolade of ‘Natural’. On Clare’s relationship with oral traditions, see George Deacon’s remarkable book, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (Sinclair Browne), 1983.
p. 97 A Cromwell-trench: a landmark-remnant of the Civil War.
p. 104 Where boys unheeding passed: MC reads ‘past’. Clare tended to use ‘past’ for both ‘passed’ and ‘past’. Where this seems likely to create uncertainty in the modern reader, I have distinguished them.
p. 111 Thriving on seams: here ‘seam’ is used in its older, now obsolete, sense of an intervening strip of land, i.e. with water on both sides. In the next line, the manuscript reads ‘island’, but the sense requires the plural; ‘swell’ is used transitively.
p. 119 But they who hunt the field: i.e. gypsies, Clare was on close terms with the gypsies of his area: it was from them that he learned to play the fiddle; and when he came to escape from his first asylum, it was to gypsies that Clare typically turned for guidance.
p. 120 The shepherd threw: the manuscript reads ‘through’, but there seems to be nothing gained from keeping such errors in transcription. We all make such mistakes, especially when tired or momentarily inattentive, and they have no linguistic/stylistic significance whatsoever. This stanza offers an extreme case of Clare’s parataxis, each line comprising a simple sentence. The disjointedness seems to express the rhythm of the action.
p. 121 The Badger: in this sonnet-sequence, I have chosen to place the ‘Some keep a baited badger . . .’ sonnet after the first, rather than last, since in the terminal position it is gratingly anti-climactic.
p. 125 To violets I compare: in MC, the second word reads ‘voilets’. In an equally good manuscript source, it reads ‘violets’. The case for the former is that it offers a clue to Clare’s phonetics. The case for ‘violets’ is that it is free of quaintness and does not draw attention to itself as odd. The presentation of Clare’s poetry raises many such questions: my present purpose is to minimize distractions or obstacles, while respecting the peculiar integrity of Clare’s text.
p. 126 Dedication to Mary: in the manuscripts, ‘Mary’ appears in the title as four asterisks and in line 1 as M ***. Clare’s conduct as a lyrical poet was fraught with circumstantial problems, since he was paying explicit homage to Mary whilst living with Martha (Patty).
p. 130 Scarce nine days passed us ere we met: M C omits ‘us’, but the metre requires it.
Now nine years’ suns: Clare’s relationship with Mary ended in 1816; this poem was published in the Souvenir in 1826.
p. 131 Ballad: the last stanza encapsulates Clare’s dilemma: ‘another (Patty) claims [to be] akin’ but Mary must recognize her own right also to claim a bond. This is a foreshadowing of Clare’s later obsessive efforts to resolve the contradictions of his emotions, which finally gave rise to his belief that he had committed bigamy.
p. 135 The Enthusiast: this is one of Clare’s most ambitious attempts to achieve psychological sense or coherence à propos Mary’s place in his mind, her continuing and virtually continuous ‘presence’. He achieves only a partial resolution in the paradox of ‘aching joy’. So it was to be, for the rest of his life.
White: Henry Kirke White, the son of a butcher, was encouraged by Southey and published a volume of precocious verse. He died at the age of twenty-one in 1806.
p. 138 That blue of thirteen summers bye: if Clare had last met Mary in 1816, this would suggest an 1829 dating for the poem.
p. 143Ballad: the last stanza offers Clare’s alternative resolution of his contradictions: ‘woman’s cold perverted will/ And soon-estranged opinion’: not merely disenchantment but also a dismissive bitterness. Clare returned to this view in his ‘Old Wigs and Sundries’ under the influence of Byron’s Don Juan, but it was not by any means his most characteristic determination.
p. 145 Ere sun: the MS reads ‘suns’, but the sense requires ‘sun’.
p. 152 The Robin’s Nest: Clare’s withdrawal into the more remote or ‘private’ retreats of nature is both negative and positive. It derives in part from the ‘De contemptu mundi’ theme in late-eighteenth-century poetry; it is also a matter of a personal liking for solitude and of social disenchantment; it is probably most emphatically rooted in an almost pre-conscious affinity with the less compromised reaches of natural life.
p. 156 Wild heaths to trace — and note their broken tree: MC reads ‘not’, but the sense requires ‘note’.
p. 164 Yet to all minds: MC reads ‘mind’.
p. 165 The morn with saffron stripes: MC reads ‘safforn strips’ but Clare elsewhere writes ‘stript’ for ‘striped’, and was familiar with Byron’s liking for ‘saffron’.
p. 171 The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung: here Clare transfers the term ‘vulgar’ from the poor to the landowners. Cf. E. P. Thompson’s comment on a similar turn in Wordsworth: Education and Experience, Leeds University Press, 1963.
p. 172 Nor carry round some names to win: in their edition of Clare (Oxford University Press, 1984), RP omit ‘to win’, producing an incomplete line.
p. 190 On the twenty-ninth of May: Oak-apple Day, officially the celebration of Charles II’s escape, probably derived from an earlier rural festival.
p. 193 The Old Man’s Song: Clare was not yet forty when he wrote this. It has clear affinities with the poetry of Cowper’s melancholia, but rehearses the themes of Clare’s own circumstances, prior to and following the move or flitting to Northborough. He enclosed this and other poems in a letter to L. T. Ventouillac, 9 May 1830, who had asked Clare for some ‘short, lyrical, spirited compositions’ (Letters, ed. M. Storey, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 507). In the version enclosed with the letter, ‘Joy once reflected brightly of prospects overcast’ reads, ‘of prospects that are past’, and ‘Is overspread with glooms’ reads, ‘Is overcast with . . .’ ‘Joy once reflected brightly of prospects overcast . . .’: ‘reflected’ may signify ‘mirrored’ or ‘thought of’; ‘of’ may therefore be intended as ‘off’.
p. 195 Remembrances: the names refer to some of Clare’s favourite walks around Helpstone; the two named oak trees were both felled to make way for the new boundaries, hedgerows and ditches of enclosure.
p. 1
96 While I see the little mouldiwarps: the mole-catcher hung dead moles on the tree, to display the fact that he had done his job. Nowadays, the moles are stuck on the barbs of barbed-wire.
p. 198 The Flitting: this and the following poem, ‘Decay’, were written after Clare’s removal to Northborough. There is a draft of part of ‘Decay’ on a letter written to Clare at Northborough. Surprisingly, Clare manages to turn the conclusion of ‘The Flitting’ to a positive note: whatever time and change do to us, nature will survive. Molehills and rabbit-tracks: MC reads ‘tracts’.
p. 207A make-believe on April-day: i.e. April Fools’ Day.
p. 208 in Clare’s memory: in the 1820s Clare had idolized Byron; in 1824, he wrote an eloquent account of Byron’s funeral, which he witnessed during a visit to London that also included some exposure to the city’s low-life: the French Playhouse, with its ‘smoke, smocks, smirks, smells and smutty doings’; displays of pugilism at the Fives Court; and The Hole in the Wall, in Chancery Lane, run by the most celebrated ex-pugilist, Jack Randall.
Clare’s library contained J. H. Reynolds’s The Fancy (1820), a spoof-memoir of a poet apparently modelled on Clare, in which Byron and the dubious world of pugilism were closely associated: ‘Of all the great men of this age, in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism, there is no one of such transcendant talent as Randall . . . Lord Byron is a wonderful poet, with a mind weighing fourteen stone; but he is too sombre a hitter, and is apt to lose his temper. Randall has no defect . . .’
In the same year, Taylor’s London Magazine published a review of Thomas Medwin’s Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, which featured Byron’s promiscuity, his contempt for women and a simple tribute that must have caught Clare’s fancy: ‘Of all my schoolfellows, I know no one for whom I have retained so much friendship as for Lord Clare’; and it was Byron who had written: ‘I have a passion for the name of “Mary”’ (Don Juan, Canto 5, stanza IV); who had treated of bigamy (stanza XX); who had written of ‘hopes which will not deceive’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, stanza CXIV); and even of ‘bedlamites broke loose’ (Don Juan, Canto 6, stanza XXXIV). Again in 1820, in his second Letter to John Murray, Byron had come to John Clare’s defence.
p. 211 Maid of Walkherd: clearly modelled on Byron’s ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part’.
p. 212The Gipsy Camp: it was the local gypsies who showed Clare the road leading north out of Epping Forest, prior to his escape in July 1841.
Nigh Leopard’s Hill: in 1837, John Taylor, who had published Clare’s first three volumes, sought the advice of Dr George Darling, who had treated Clare’s ailments during his visits to London. Darling recommended that Clare be placed in the care of Dr Matthew Allen, at his private asylum, Fairmead House, High Beech, in Epping Forest, north of London. In 1830, Taylor had published Dr John Conolly’s Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity,and, like Conolly, Allen was committed to the humane treatment of the insane. His Cases of Insanity, with Medical,Moral and Philosophical Observations had been published in 1831, and Taylor published his Essay on the Classification of the Insane in 1838. Allen’s mental science was an odd mixture of good sense, animal magnetism, phrenology and the influences of weather. Clare was admitted in June 1837, and Allen found his mind ‘not so much lost and deranged as suspended in its movements by the oppressive and permanent state of anxiety, and fear, and vexation, produced by the excitement of excessive flattery at one time, and neglect at another, his extreme poverty and over-exertion of mind, and no wonder that his feeble bodily frame . . . was overcome.’
p. 214 Ballad: the capitalization of every word occurs in Clare’s manuscripts sporadically, and is seemingly an attempt to achieve emphasis so as to be attended to.
Don Juan: after Byron’s death in 1824, a fashionable literary game was to write ‘continuations’ of his Don Juan: one of them, published in 1825, was in Clare’s library. Clare himself drafted an advertisement for his poem, thus: ‘Speedily will be published / The sale of Old Wigs and Sundries/ A Poem by Lord Byron’ ( MSS6 and 8).
The central theme of Clare’s ‘Old Wigs . . .’ is the pervasiveness of deceit: in a remarkable letter to his wife, he remarks: ‘I am in Prison because I won’t leave my family and tell a falsehood . . . Truth is the best companion for it levels all distinctions in pretentions . . . Truth, wether it enters the Ring or the Hall of Justice, shows a plain Man that is not to be scared at shadows or big words . . .’
Clare’s targets are marital deceit, political deceit, social deceit: Wigs offered him both a pun on Whigs and also an emblem of the deceitful disguise of the powerful. His pugilistic challenge was issued on 1 May 1841:
Jack Randall’s Challange to All the World Jack Randall The Champion Of The Prize Ring Begs Leave To Inform the Sporting World That He Is Ready To Meet Any Customer In The Ring Or On The Stage To Fight For The Sum Of £500 Or £1000 A Side A Fair Stand Up Fight half Minute Time Win Or Loose he Is Not Particular As to Weight Colour Or Country All He Wishes Is To Meet With a Customer Who Has Pluck Enough To Come To The Scratch
Jack Randall
May 1st 1841
His Byronic challenge was ‘Old Wigs and Sundries’.
p. 216 And I of blunt: money.
p. 217 beaten hollow: in the election, July 1841. Noble Lord John: in June and July 1841, the newspapers announced the forthcoming marriage of Lord John Russell and Lady Fanny Elliot. Victoria and Albert were married in February 1840, and Albert first left her to visit the Continent in March 1844. Clare, it seems, was revising this poem in that year.
p. 218 And so resign: Melbourne resigned in August 1841. the young princess: Victoria Adelaide, born November 1841.
p. 219I’ve never seen: i.e. animals, unlike humans, cannot practise deceit or disguise.
Ponders End: three miles from High Beech.
‘Cease your funning’: from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.
Eliza Phillips: the text of the poem in M S 8 is followed by this letter:
My dear Eliza Phillips
Having been cooped up in this Hell of a Madhouse till I seem to be disowned by my friends and even forgot by my enemies for there is none to accept my challanges which I have from time to time given to the public I am almost mad in waiting for a better place and better company and all to no purpose It is well known that I am a prize fighter by profession and a man that never feared anybody in my life either in the ring or out of it - I do not much like to write love letters but this which I am now writing to you is a true one — you know that we have met before and the first oppertunity that offers we will meet again - I am now writing a New Canto of Don Juan which I have taken the liberty to dedicate to you in remembrance of Days gone bye and when I have finished it I would send you the vol if I knew how in which is a new Canto of Child Harold also — I am my dear Elize
yours sincerely
John Clare
p. 220 Doctor Bottle: Allen would collect urine samples from the patients for analysis, especially for signs of V D: cf.. ‘Some p-x-d ...’
To see red hell, and further on, the white one: there were three separate houses at High Beech asylum: Fairmead, Springfield and Leopard’s (or Leppit’s) Hill. If Fairmead was Allen’s residence, then the two ‘hells’ would be Springfield and Leopard’s Hill, where the patients lived, women in the first and men in the second: the colours may simply be a reference to the colours of brick and stucco.
p. 221 Next Tuesday: Clare’s birthday was 13 July.
Lord Byron? Poh: this seems to be intended as the voice of an intrusive Cockney interlocutor, dismissing Byron; Clare’s response to this dismissal seems to begin at line 3. The choice of a Cockney dialect is entirely appropriate, since most of Allen’s patients would be from London and the home counties.
Who wed two wives: Byron’s sexual adventures here connect with Clare’s delusion that he himself was ‘imprisoned’ for ‘bigamy’.
And buy the book: Clare ends with his abiding preoccupation — how to sustain his vocation as poet and make a living by it.
p. 222 Prison Amusements, or Child Harold: in about 1848, Clare wrote to Mary Howitt: ‘I have poetical sweethearts too, which my fancy dwells on as it did when I was single. So, in writing of these as my fancy dictates, they grow imperceptibly into a Vol. and then I call it “Child Harold”, of which I wrote much both in Essex and here, which 1 did and do merely to kill time, and whose more proper title might be “Prison Amusements”.’ He used the title again in a letter to Knight in July 1850.
Many are poets: cf. Byron: ‘Many are poets who have never penn’d . . .’ (‘The Prophecy of Dante’).
No zeal: Clare explicitly turns away from the political matters of ‘Old Wigs and Sundries’.
Great little minds: i. e. small-minded people who are economically or socially powerful. Cf. ‘The Mores’ and ‘The Elm Tree’.
p. 224 She in the Lowlands: a reference to Mary Joyce, in the Fens, and Clare, separated in the relative elevation of Epping Forest. The terms echo those of Burns.
p. 225 Keeps off the tempest: images of shipwreck persist throughout the poetry of Clare’s asylum years; a debt, perhaps, to Byron. Cf. Don Juan, Canto 5, stanza I V.
I’ve wandered: this and the next Song were written immediately after Clare’s arrival at Northborough, 23 July 1841, after his escape from High Beech.
p. 226 Falsehood is here: in ‘Old Wigs and Sundries’, falsehood involved the whole social/political fabric. Here it is construed in personal terms: he cannot believe those who tell him that Mary died in 1838.
The church-spire: the spire of Glinton church. Glinton was Mary’s village, and the spire was visible for miles around.
p. 227 Here let the Muse: again, Clare is aware that it is not this poem’s business to deal with matters that appear in ‘Old Wigs . . .’
Mere painted beauty: Clare sporadically contrasts the ‘truth’ of the rural ingenuousness of such women as Mary and the deceitful pretensions of women of sophistication, worldliness or fame.
p. 228 Sweet Susan . . . And Bessey: women’s names occur frequently in the poems, letters and jottings of the asylum years. Many of them have been identified, from directories, as actual people — shopkeepers’ daughters, publicans’ wives and so on. Clare’s susceptibility to women persisted virtually undiminished in his later years.
p. 229 Written in a Thunderstorm: written on Thursday, 15 July, five days before Clare made his escape. The writing of the rest of the poem seems to follow his escape. Even though he has escaped, ’. . . shades are still my prison where I lie’.
p. 230 Mary how oft: these stanzas seem to have been provoked by the fact that Mary was not there to receive him on his return: since he cannot accept her death, he can only assume that she has betrayed him.
p. 231 God’s decree: i.e. monogamy.
p. 232 ‘To be beloved’: Coleridge: ‘The Pains of Sleep’.
p. 233 Now melancholly autumn: Clare returns to his native scene in his favourite season.
p. 234 And freeze like Niobe: cf. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, stanza LXXIX.
p. 236 lives: MS reads ‘lifes’.
p. 238 No moment-hand: i.e. the minute-hand of the clock.
p. 239 Peace-plenty: harvest celebrations.
This life: here the ‘Old Wigs . . .’ tone and matter intrude briefly.
p. 242 Then he the tennant: in this stanza Clare writes of himself in the third person, a sign that he is simultaneously writing of Byron, hence the ‘princely palace’.
p. 243 O Mary dear, three springs: this seems to be some kind of recognition that his crucial severance from Mary occurred three years ago, i.e. in 1838, the year of her death.
E‘en round her home I seek her there: the manuscript reads ‘I seek her here’.
p. 246 From bank to bank: cf. ‘The Flood’, and ‘Lolham Brigs’. And there the ivy: MS omits ‘the’.
p. 247 Here’s a health: Burns’s voice.
p. 251 ‘Tis solitude in citys: since it is Clare’s practice to incorporate immediate current experience into his poem, this may be support for the view that Clare continued to write this sequence in Northampton, after 29 December 1841.
p. 255 The Paigles Bloom and On the retireing solitudes of May (next stanza): probably late spring/early summer, 1842.
p. 258 The Happy Milk Maid . . . E’en Queens Might Sigh: Clare later develops this distinction. See p. 305.
p. 261 Mary would be in the mind: in the manuscript, there is a blank before ‘Mary’.
p. 263 Mary and Martha: emblems of two complementary aspects of woman as mate: romantic and domestic.
p. 266 I hear the clapping gate: this image is taken up again, offering a linking motif, in the first stanza of the continuation of ‘Prison Amusements’: see p. 282.
p. 267 I am their like, a desert man: cf. Byron: ‘Oh! that the desert were my dwelling-place/With one fair spirit for my minister’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, stanza CLXXVII).
p. 268 Martinmass: November 1841.
p. 269 Bastille: a recurring motif in Clare’s letters from Northampton.
p. 270 Royce wood and Tenters Nook: near Helpstone.
p. 272 amaranthine bower: the ‘amarant’ was a mythical everlasting flower; ‘amaranths’ were decorative flowers, e.g. love-lies-bleeding. The two terms were elided long ago.
June 1844: the Knight transcripts are in two or more hands; the punctuation is variable and often misguided; some poems are dated.
p. 273 O wert thou in the storm: modelled on Burns’s ‘O, wert thou in the cauld blast . . .’
p. 274 A Vision: in Clare’s Northampton poetry, the poetry of seeing with the physical eye is gradually complemented, but never displaced, by a poetry of visionary seeing, beyond time and place.
fancied love: cf. his letter to Matthew Allen, in which he distinguishes between ‘one of my fancys’, i.e. Patty, and ‘my poetical fancy’, i.e. Mary (Letters, ed. Storey, p. 650).
p. 276 Stanzas: the title probably derives from Byron’s ‘Stanzas for Music’.
p. 281 The Invitation: the natural world is apprehended more and more through the ear as Clare ages; his eyes register a variety of vibrant movements that will not be still (this observation I owe to Tim Chilcott).
p. 282 Prison Amusements: I have supplied the title; MS 19 contains none, but the evidence of Clare’s letters strongly supports the view that this is of a piece with the earlier sequence. Clare’s text is preceded by a quotation from Cowper’s ‘The Task’: ‘O for a Lodge in some vast wilderness /Some boundless contiguity of shade/Where rumour of oppression and deceit/Of unsuccessful or successful war/ Might never reach me more’. There is a strong affinity between this and the last stanza of the previous sequence. The gate . . . then claps: see note to p. 266.
p. 283 boyhood’s secret: a reference to Clare’s first experience of terror or vastation: secret, because he had kept it to himself.
p. 284 Ave Maria: cf. Byron, Don Juan, Canto 3, stanza CII.
p. 286 Hath time made no change: the stanza pattern here breaks down and Clare shifts to rhyming couplets.
p. 289 Pays in destruction: cf. Byron, ‘pays off moments in an endless shower/Of hell-fire . . .’ (Don Juan, Canto 2 , stanza CXCII).
p. 294 Song: most of the songs in this sequence are unsuccessfully rendered in the language of Burns, but there was not enough iron in Clare’s soul to maintain a Burnsian tone.
p. 295 the old stone wall: this stanza is followed by this quatrain: ‘Verses on Olney: A charm is thrown o’er Olney plains/By Cowper’s rural muse/While sunshine gilds the river Ouse/ In morning’s meadow dews.’
p. 297That loved the many all alike: Clare acknowledges that many young women have attracted his affections/aroused his desires. He rushes to redeem himself in the last line of the stanza.
p. 298 Yet ‘Man was made to mourn’: cf. Burns, ‘Man was made to Mourn’.
The pheasant’s nest: the manuscript reads ‘peasants’. ‘Yardley Oak’ was one of Cowper’s most celebrated poems; it included a recognition of the claims of Fancy over Reason that Clare would himself endorse.
p. 304 Where are the citys: cf. the reference to Sodom, p. 249. Clare’s interest in the fate of Sodom is not merely a case of his growing fascination with the vision of some apocalyptic destruction, but also derives specifically from the fascinated revulsion which the perverse sexuality of some of the inmates at High Beech seems to have aroused in him.
Following this stanza is a song which I omit from this selection. It is dated 15 February 1845.
p. 305 O for one real . . . blessing: in this stanza and those that follow, Clare explores the various types of women that had aroused his feelings and desires; starting with the paradox of ‘real imaginary’ and ‘Ideal real’, he lays bare his own erotic susceptibility. As on p. 258, the thought of milkmaids - pastoralized innocence or a tumble in the hay - is associated with the converse type, the queen, via gypsy wench and beggar girls.
p. 306 Sweet as Queen’s portraits: these would have appeared in all the shop-windows of Northampton, in November 1844, when Queen Victoria made a progress through the town on her way to Burghley House. Triumphal arches were erected, and Clare was allocated a seat near one.
With bonny bosom: this stanza vividly demonstrates the peculiar vulnerability of Clare’s unedited texts. Without punctuation, it seems to be incoherent nonsense; but when we recognize that toward the end of the second line Clare turns away from the milkmaid, to apostrophize the Queen, as if addressing her from his seat in the stands, his lines begin to make good rhetorical sense. What, then, does he tell the Queen? That the jewels’ of nature’s dew and showers are to be preferred to the lavish worldly jewels of courtly display: ‘from nature’s glory’ = from comparison with . . . The last line of the stanza can be construed as addressed to the Queen, or as Clare’s return to the milkmaid, or even as both.
p. 310 The first-loved face is met: the transcript reads: ‘The first love face . . .’
 
p. 311none cares or knows: it seems that no member of his family ever visited him in Northampton.
p. 313 And where is the voice: the transcript reads: ‘& where is voice’.
p. 314 Hesperus: cf. Byron, Don Juan, Canto 4, stanza CVII.
p. 316 warm and erie: i.e. eerie in its first meaning, of fearful or timid.
p. 320 The objects seen: the MS reads ‘seem’, but the syntax and sense require ‘seen’.
p. 330 round the cote: the MS reads ‘coat’.
p. 334 Through this sad non-identity: identity is a recurring subject of Clare’s reflections. Here he recognizes that a secure sense of one’s own identity rests on being recognized by others, and that the breakdown of relationships can render one’s own sense of identity insecure. Cf. Mrs Gaskell: ‘A solitary life cherishes mere fancies until they become manias.’
p. 337 I’ll gaze upon thy bosom’s swell: the transcript offers ‘thy blossom’s well’; the feebleness of the image and of the adverb can serve to alert us to an act of bowdlerizing. I have taken the liberty of offering a conjectural restoration of Clare’s most probable words.
p. 341 And my love lives at the ‘White Hart’: Clare addressed some of his Northampton poems, like letters, to specific young women; in this case, Mary Ludgate, to whom he wrote a loving letter in code, addressing her as his ‘dear daughter’. She lived at the White Hart Inn, Cotton End, and had conceivably drawn a pint for him.
p. 351 She tied up herfewthings: Clare recalls an important part of the traditional agricultural year: young people went to hiring fairs or statutes, in search of employment. Here the girl has reached the term of her contract and is returning home, for a short break, before hiring herself out again.
p. 358 The Winter’s Come: the first line contains the only figure of speech that Clare derived from Northampton’s staple industry — the manufacture of boots and shoes. Clare would have read Dante in the translation by his friend, H. F. Cary: Clare wrote to Cary in October 1832, after Cary had offered him philosophical consolation following the move to Northborough. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy enjoyed an enthusiastic revival in the early nineteenth century, largely owing to the advocacy of Charles Lamb.
These stanzas appear in a manuscript of 1850; Clare was still extending, albeit more sporadically, his ‘Prison Amusements’ sequence.
p. 361 ToJohnClare: this poem is dated 10 February 1860, and raises the question: to which John Clare? His son, John, was born 16 June 1826, and would be thirty-three, but Clare no longer reckoned the years.
the new number just laid down: chapmen-men who bought a stock of chapbooks, ballads, broadsides from provincial publishers — hawked them from village to village. One of Clare’s manuscripts was entitled ‘Halfpenny Ballads’. The stock-in-trade of the chapmen was a variety of traditional romances and truncated versions of popular novels. See Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason, Chapter 2, Methuen/Georgia University Press, 1985, and George Deacon, op. cit., pp. 34ff.