I AM Analysis

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.


While John Clare was admitted to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum he wrote a series of poems. "I Am" was one of the poems that was written by John Clare during his stay.

This poem is written in iambic pentameter and its doesn't follow the same rhyme scheme through out the poem. The first stanza is in "ababbb", the second stanza has and "ababcc" and the third follows the same.

The first thing that came to mind as I read it was the irony in the title "I Am" as many times during his stay at the asylum he didn't really know who he was as at times he thought he was Byron and even called himself Shakespeare.

The first and second stanza's tell me that being locked up in the Asylum he feels alienated from his friends and family"And e'en the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange nay, rather stranger than the rest." by saying this he says that his family and friends might as well be strangers to him as he no longer feels connected to them. The third stanza you see something that you don't see a lot of in his poems and thats God. He mentions him in his poems as if he is accepting God or even accepting death/fate that is coming to him "There to abide with my creator, God," as he knows he will be stuck in the Asylum for a long time.

I chose this poem just because it goes against a lot of the poems he had written before and it really says a lot about the effect that the time in the Asylum has had on him when you compare his old poetry to "I Am".