I am!

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.1.

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 textappears first in Martin's Life of Clare, 1865.