The Poet: John Clare, “I Am”

“I Am”

Read by Tom O'Bedlam

"I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I am the self-consumer of my woes,

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shades in life and death's oblivion lost;

And yet I am! and live with shadows tost.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;

And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best - 

Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;

A place where woman never smil'd or wept;

There to abide with my creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;

The grass below - above the vaulted sky."

- John Clare

About the poet: John Clare (13 July, 1793- 20 May, 1864) was an English poet. He was born in Northamptonshire, England in the family of a farm laborer, and lived most of his life in abject poverty. His life was marred by bouts of mania and depression, and for the final 23 years of his life, Clare was locked in an insane asylum.

Clare's poetic work mostly showcases his celebratory representations of the English countryside. In his time, Clare was commonly known as "Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. "I Am" is a commentary on the complexity of existence.

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“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering - these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.”

- “Dead Poets Society”