I Am (John Clare)

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 shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live — like vapours tossed

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;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange — nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled 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.

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This belongs to the group of poems written while Clare was confined in the Northampton County Asylum from 1842 until his death in 1864. First published in the Annual Report of the Medical Superintendent of Saint Andrews for the year 1864, but the slightly different accepted text appears first in Martin's Life of Clare, 1865. These, whether rightly or wrongly, are known as his "last lines."