.’ (Don Juan, Canto 2 , stanza CXCII).

p. 294 Song: most of the songs in this sequence are unsuccessfully rendered in the language of Burns, but there was not enough iron in Clare’s soul to maintain a Burnsian tone.

p. 295 the old stone wall: this stanza is followed by this quatrain: ‘Verses on Olney: A charm is thrown o’er Olney plains/By Cowper’s rural muse/While sunshine gilds the river Ouse/ In morning’s meadow dews.’

p. 297That loved the many all alike: Clare acknowledges that many young women have attracted his affections/aroused his desires. He rushes to redeem himself in the last line of the stanza.

p. 298 Yet ‘Man was made to mourn’: cf. Burns, ‘Man was made to Mourn’.

The pheasant’s nest: the manuscript reads ‘peasants’. ‘Yardley Oak’ was one of Cowper’s most celebrated poems; it included a recognition of the claims of Fancy over Reason that Clare would himself endorse.

p. 304 Where are the citys: cf. the reference to Sodom, p. 249. Clare’s interest in the fate of Sodom is not merely a case of his growing fascination with the vision of some apocalyptic destruction, but also derives specifically from the fascinated revulsion which the perverse sexuality of some of the inmates at High Beech seems to have aroused in him.

Following this stanza is a song which I omit from this selection. It is dated 15 February 1845.

p. 305 O for one real . . . blessing: in this stanza and those that follow, Clare explores the various types of women that had aroused his feelings and desires; starting with the paradox of ‘real imaginary’ and ‘Ideal real’, he lays bare his own erotic susceptibility. As on p. 258, the thought of milkmaids - pastoralized innocence or a tumble in the hay - is associated with the converse type, the queen, via gypsy wench and beggar girls.

p. 306 Sweet as Queen’s portraits: these would have appeared in all the shop-windows of Northampton, in November 1844, when Queen Victoria made a progress through the town on her way to Burghley House. Triumphal arches were erected, and Clare was allocated a seat near one.

With bonny bosom: this stanza vividly demonstrates the peculiar vulnerability of Clare’s unedited texts. Without punctuation, it seems to be incoherent nonsense; but when we recognize that toward the end of the second line Clare turns away from the milkmaid, to apostrophize the Queen, as if addressing her from his seat in the stands, his lines begin to make good rhetorical sense. What, then, does he tell the Queen? That the jewels’ of nature’s dew and showers are to be preferred to the lavish worldly jewels of courtly display: ‘from nature’s glory’ = from comparison with . . . The last line of the stanza can be construed as addressed to the Queen, or as Clare’s return to the milkmaid, or even as both.

p. 310 The first-loved face is met: the transcript reads: ‘The first love face . . .’

 

p. 311none cares or knows: it seems that no member of his family ever visited him in Northampton.

p.