DLTK's Poems
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
tost
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;
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
