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. 247 Here’s a health: Burns’s voice.

p. 251 ‘Tis solitude in citys: since it is Clare’s practice to incorporate immediate current experience into his poem, this may be support for the view that Clare continued to write this sequence in Northampton, after 29 December 1841.

p. 255 The Paigles Bloom and On the retireing solitudes of May (next stanza): probably late spring/early summer, 1842.

p. 258 The Happy Milk Maid . . . E’en Queens Might Sigh: Clare later develops this distinction. See p. 305.

p. 261 Mary would be in the mind: in the manuscript, there is a blank before ‘Mary’.

p. 263 Mary and Martha: emblems of two complementary aspects of woman as mate: romantic and domestic.

p. 266 I hear the clapping gate: this image is taken up again, offering a linking motif, in the first stanza of the continuation of ‘Prison Amusements’: see p. 282.

p. 267 I am their like, a desert man: cf. Byron: ‘Oh! that the desert were my dwelling-place/With one fair spirit for my minister’ (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, stanza CLXXVII).

p. 268 Martinmass: November 1841.

p. 269 Bastille: a recurring motif in Clare’s letters from Northampton.

p.