‘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.