SpokenVerse | "I Am" Written in Northampton County Asylum by John Clare (read by Tom O'Bedlam) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded May 2013 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
"The greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare

The Northampton Asylum 1845
pb.rcpsych.org/content/28/4/140/F1.expansion

Painting - Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628, by Pieter Claesz

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost,
And yet I am, I live, though I am toss'd
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that 's dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange, nay, they are stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod—
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept—
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,—
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.