Another Monday and Tuesday this week in the Peterborough Archive, and as always it seems, came up with quite a few Clare poems I did not recognise. Here is just one, written in pencil, an alternative version of "Pleasures of Spring" (lines 283-292). I must admit I do think the alternatives in these lines are somewhat more 'Clarean'!?
Forth walks the man of taste among the woods
& fields & where small channels run their floods
Loud laughing on their errands watering flowers
& down the narrow lanes he walks for hours
All carpeted anew with young swathes [of] grass
So soft that birds hear not the feet that pass
Close by their nests he peeps the leaves among
& marks with rapture how they brood their young
He drops beneath the bush [beside] the running brook
To read some pages of a favourite book
Pet MS A31 p23 if you are interested in exactly where I found it.
Compare the final two lines with the PoS (published) version, which do you prefer?
- Then drops beneath the bushes to peruse
-
A pocket poet of some favoured muse
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1 comment:
I hope it is not too late to comment here, but the ending of the Pet Ms strikes me as a much more natural ending than the published version, which indeed seems a reworked and forced version of the former.
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