THIRD VOLUME
"In the Shadows"
John Clare and Mary
Joyce
Come come my love the bush is growing
The linnet sings the tune again
He sung when thou with garments flowing
Went talking with me down the lane
Dreaming of beauty ere I found thee
& musing by the bushes green
The wind enamourd streaming round thee
Paintd the visions I had seen.
He sung when thou with garments flowing
Went talking with me down the lane
Dreaming of beauty ere I found thee
& musing by the bushes green
The wind enamourd streaming round thee
Paintd the visions I had seen.
Exploring Clare's
largely illusory relationship with Mary Joyce through Clare's own verse. Lots of largely unknown poems and a few that have never been published. £25 direct from me.
A short extract from my 'Afterword' :
A short extract from my 'Afterword' :
"Was it the sight
of the flame-blackened lintel at Mary’s home during his searches for her -- as
visitors to Glinton Church and Green can still observe by strolling along the
road to Peakirk to the Joyce Farmhouse -- finally make him realise she was
dead?
Daily walking the
paths and tracks between the Northborough cottage and Glinton, and no doubt visiting again
and again the places they had both loved, he is met by the same views that once
entranced him, but she is gone. Driven
into himself, he finds his heart as bleak and forbidding a place as the early
winter landscape. She is always present
in his mind, but never present in reality.
Haunted by a shadow, searching for someone who could never appear, and with the void in his heart growing every day, the isolation within his soul felt like the abyss itself, eating away at his very existence. Powerless to do anything but to continue to live as a stranger in the Northborough cottage, living daily with the soul wrenching realisation that Mary was lost forever."
Haunted by a shadow, searching for someone who could never appear, and with the void in his heart growing every day, the isolation within his soul felt like the abyss itself, eating away at his very existence. Powerless to do anything but to continue to live as a stranger in the Northborough cottage, living daily with the soul wrenching realisation that Mary was lost forever."
---oOo---
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