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.

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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).