A Poem from the Nuthouse

Not one of mine this time, you'll be relieved to hear.

My recollection of John Clare yesterday (a favourite of mine since I studied him for O-Level long, long ago) prompted me to dig out this - one of his greatest and best-known works, from the later decades of his life when he was confined in an Insane Asylum just outside of Northampton.

There have been few better evocations of isolation and abandonment, and the lonely rages they produce.


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 toss'd

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 (1793-1864)