Clare The Dryad

A Dryad is a tree nymph, generally associated with an oak tree, but perhaps because she is a very young and inexperienced Dryad, Clare has chosen a sycamore as her home. Considered to be very shy creatures, when caught in the open they will instantly stand still and merge indistinguishably into their background - Clare hasn't quite mastered this. According to Clare however it was to her that Keats was referring in his Ode to a Nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

May 1819