"I Am" by 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 oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:
And yet I am, and live—like vapours toss’t
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise —
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath 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.
