1. Opus 131 has been described as expressing savage, raw emotions, sadness and tragic foreboding, but it has at its heart a folk-like theme which binds the movements together with an ephemeral beauty and which ultimately explodes into ecstatic joy.

2. Ted, when asked about his sources of inspiration, said of Beethoven and Blake: “if you could dig to the bottom of my strata maybe their names and works would be the deepest traces”. He also spoke of the violent energies of the world being expressed in the “violence of great works” and in “those moments of [of artistic genius] in Beethoven”. Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1980. pp. 202 and 199).

3. The white mare is “oceanless”, perhaps, because the white tops of rough, wind-blown waves are known as ‘white horses’: so, the sea is her element, as it is that of the Goddess.

4. Robert Graves notes that in 1673 a woman accused of witchcraft confessed to having been temporarily transformed into a mare. Graves, The White Goddess, Faber, 1977, p. 385.

5. In this speech Duke Vicentio expounds on the theme of an essay by French Hermeticist, Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, which in 1592 was translated into English by Mary Sidney, Duchess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip Sidney the leader of the Areopagus poets who used Cabbalistic number theory in their poems. Du Mornay wrote: “Neither ought we to fly from death, for it is childish to fear it; and in fleeing from it we meet it”. His Discourse of Life and Death ends: “Die to Live / Live to Die”. Appropriately, Measure for Measure, despite its Cabbalistically balanced title, is a play about unbalanced love, lust, severe justice and trickery: above all, it demonstrates the need for balance.

6. On 9 Oct. 1968 Assia’s divorce from David Wevill was granted. The letter from the Registry notifying her that it was final and absolute did not arrive until mid-February 1969. She wrote to David at that time wishing him every happiness. Shortly after that, unknown to Assia, David married again. For the first time since she married John Steele in 1947, Assia was unmarried and living alone with her small daughter. She was forty-two years old. In March Assia and Ted were house-hunting in Yorkshire. On 22 March Ted returned to Devon: Assia to her flat in London. On 23 March, 1969, Assia committed suicide, taking her small daughter with her.

7. Budge, W. The Gods of the Egyptians, Dover, NY, 1969, Book II, pp. 103, 107-8.

8. As described in ‘The Error’ (C 16).

9. Air is the Element of Mercury, who links heaven and earth. And, suitably, the round, linked, twin domes of a sycamore seed without its wings(as it will be when it begins to germinate) resemble Mercury’s number, 8.

10. “Every writer”, Ted told Faas, “develops either outwards into society and history… or inwards into imagination and beyond that into spirit… ”. Everything he said to Faas about the summoning of shamanic poets and about their journey to the underworld for healing energies is also of particular relevance here. Faas, op.cit. pp..204-206.