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’.