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.