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 .