. . 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. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, stanza LXXIX.

p. 236 lives: MS reads ‘lifes’.

p. 238 No moment-hand: i.e. the minute-hand of the clock.

p. 239 Peace-plenty: harvest celebrations.

This life: here the ‘Old Wigs . . .’ tone and matter intrude briefly.

p. 242 Then he the tennant: in this stanza Clare writes of himself in the third person, a sign that he is simultaneously writing of Byron, hence the ‘princely palace’.

p. 243 O Mary dear, three springs: this seems to be some kind of recognition that his crucial severance from Mary occurred three years ago, i.e. in 1838, the year of her death.

E‘en round her home I seek her there: the manuscript reads ‘I seek her here’.

p. 246 From bank to bank: cf. ‘The Flood’, and ‘Lolham Brigs’. And there the ivy: MS omits ‘the’.

p.