Written during John Clare's second incarceration at Northampton County Asylum from 1842 until his death in 1864. He had previously left the asylum to walk home in search for his first love Mary Joyce, with whom he believed was married with three children. Upon arrival at Mary's home, he was told that she had died three years earlier.
Clare had long suffered from manic depression; as this poem describes his mental and physical sufferings. I am! later became one of Clare's most celebrated poems, although the words have been considered to trivialise his misfortunes.
Clare was known for a distinct 'attitude' within his writing. These are regarded as his 'last lines'.
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 love 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