ArticleIP_3443.txt

   
   
      
         
            I Am

            
               (posted Wednesday,
Sept. 23, 1998)
            

            To hear Robert Pinsky read
"I Am," click .

            
Self-educated, poor beyond imagining, John Clare experienced a brief,
condescending vogue as England's "Peasant Poet," at a time when illiteracy was
a norm for England's rural workers, and poets were expected to come from higher
social ranks. (Keats, for example, was ridiculed for writing "Cockney poetry.")
When he was in fashion, people would visit his cottage and sometimes give him a
few coins. When the novelty had worn off, this immensely gifted writer
experienced isolation and hardship, and finally became insane, spending most of
his life in an institution. The tough, memorable language of "I Am"
demonstrates that Clare was an extremely impressive artist. Lines such as "I am
the self-consumer of my woes" have a distinction and force that need no
propping up by the pathos of the life behind the writing. The plainness of this
poem is wonderfully achieved and eloquent.

            
               --Robert Pinsky
            

            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
shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes--And yet I am, and live--like vapors
tossed

            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 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 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.