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. 276 Stanzas: the title probably derives from Byron’s ‘Stanzas for Music’.

p. 281 The Invitation: the natural world is apprehended more and more through the ear as Clare ages; his eyes register a variety of vibrant movements that will not be still (this observation I owe to Tim Chilcott).

p. 282 Prison Amusements: I have supplied the title; MS 19 contains none, but the evidence of Clare’s letters strongly supports the view that this is of a piece with the earlier sequence. Clare’s text is preceded by a quotation from Cowper’s ‘The Task’: ‘O for a Lodge in some vast wilderness /Some boundless contiguity of shade/Where rumour of oppression and deceit/Of unsuccessful or successful war/ Might never reach me more’. There is a strong affinity between this and the last stanza of the previous sequence. The gate . . . then claps: see note to p. 266.

p. 283 boyhood’s secret: a reference to Clare’s first experience of terror or vastation: secret, because he had kept it to himself.

p. 284 Ave Maria: cf. Byron, Don Juan, Canto 3, stanza CII.

p. 286 Hath time made no change: the stanza pattern here breaks down and Clare shifts to rhyming couplets.

p. 289 Pays in destruction: cf. Byron, ‘pays off moments in an endless shower/Of hell-fire . .