[Image : Anne Lee]
On Friday, 11th July working in the Clare Archives in Peterborough I had a spare 10 minutes at the end of the day. I had been checking for errors in my transcription of a poem that will be published for the first time in Anne Lee and my future volume "In the Shadows". I idly turned over a few pages and encountered this, also unpublished poem outside of the Clarendon Editions (see comment below) of nine verses. The day afterward I read the first three verses - the only ones I had transcribed by then - at the public reading of Clare's work at the John Clare Festival. Here are those verses...
Come maiden dear maiden a beautiful troop
Come maiden dear maiden a beautiful troop
Of images now the young morning doth wear
The lark leaves her nest & the dew
splashes up
As she flies through the clover &
sings in the air
The bushes that rustle & catch at thy
gown
The trees that thy pathway envelopes in
leaves
The grass smooth as velvet runs green up
and down
& from the young morning a rapture
receives
& from the green hedge that the path
brushes nigh
The flight of a bird shakes the rain in
the place
& the blackbird frit off from her
nest rushing bye
Shakes a shower on the path that will sprinkle thy face
Shakes a shower on the path that will sprinkle thy face
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2 comments:
Was published in Middle Poems, volume V, p. 133+.
Ahha... I have two volumes of the Clarendon missing from my collection, and you guessed it, MP V is one of them. However, the Clare Indexes are wrong too (always my first point of call) so they will need to be updated.
THANK YOU whoever you are!
RR
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