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. 270 Royce wood and Tenters Nook: near Helpstone.

p. 272 amaranthine bower: the ‘amarant’ was a mythical everlasting flower; ‘amaranths’ were decorative flowers, e.g. love-lies-bleeding. The two terms were elided long ago.

June 1844: the Knight transcripts are in two or more hands; the punctuation is variable and often misguided; some poems are dated.

p. 273 O wert thou in the storm: modelled on Burns’s ‘O, wert thou in the cauld blast . . .’

p. 274 A Vision: in Clare’s Northampton poetry, the poetry of seeing with the physical eye is gradually complemented, but never displaced, by a poetry of visionary seeing, beyond time and place.

fancied love: cf. his letter to Matthew Allen, in which he distinguishes between ‘one of my fancys’, i.e. Patty, and ‘my poetical fancy’, i.e. Mary (Letters, ed. Storey, p. 650).

p.