I AM

Clare, John

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Ratzan, Richard M.

Link to the Poem

Date of entry: Jun-24-2019

Summary

"I AM" is a poem by John Clare with three sestets in iambic pentameter with an ABABAB rhyming pattern unique to each sestet. In it the poet affirms his identity, his sorrows to date and ends with the expressed longing for a happier life in the presence of God and the solitude of Nature. Due to his disorderly life, unconcern for conventional spelling, and transcriptions of his poems by others, there are often multiple versions extant for an individual poem. This is true for "I AM", which Jonathan Bate, the author of a magisterial biography of the poet, states was written in a psychiatric institution about 1846. (1, page 505) For this annotation I have used what many consider to be the most authoritative edition of his poems. The poem also exists in several reliable sites on the internet.

The poet was a troubled man born near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1793, in meager circumstances and remaining so throughout his entire life. Save for a five month period in 1841, Clare spent the last 27 of his 71 years in psychiatric institutions. He wrote his poetry, which primarily celebrates the natural world he spent so much time in alone, before and during his hospitalizations. His reputation as a poet has burgeoned significantly in the last 100 years.

Commentary

"I AM" is a poem of quiet desperation yet one that skillfully weds that weltschmerz with a feeling of determination and a yearning for a happier life, but notably a life alone in Nature. The "I am" is not - despite its first line - a poetic equivalent of Descartes' more philosophical equation of cognition with existence, i.e., "cogito, ergo sum". Rather it is a self-assessment, an almost existentialist taking-of-stock. At the same time it is an assertion and declaration of his individuality despite no one caring or knowing what that individuality is. Although this isolation would seem to be true of everyone, as Matthew Arnold posits in his poem "To Marguerite: Continued", Clare implies that it is possible to know others. It is just that no one, even friends and "the dearest", has either made the effort or succeeded. Moreover, Clare is not simply wishing to be left alone; rather he seems to desire total isolation ("Untroubling, and untroubled") - a poetic embodiment of Sir Isaiah Berlin's two liberties: freedom to be alone and freedom from other's harms to his identity. (It is interesting in this regard that most reports of his illness stressed delusions rather than paranoia.)

To bolster his argument that he is alone in this world, the first two sestets have, numbingly, a disappointment or statement of sadness in almost every line. The last sestet abandons these unhappy moments of his life, a life of rejection ("My friends forsake me like a memory lost"), and ends with a longing for a peaceful solitude "with my Creator, God" and Nature ("The grass below - above the vaulted sky.") This last sestet could mean just that, literally, or be a poetic longing for death. (Bate feels this last sestet expresses a longing "at once for both childhood and the grave."[1, page 505]) If one reads it as the latter, this last sestet recalls, in its tone and diction, Rupert Brooke's equally proleptic poem, "The Soldier". This longing is so intense that to this reader it feels like hope, which represents a movement from the desperation (etymologically meaning "without hope") of the preceding two sestets to the implicit hope dominating the last sestet.

This poem could be fruitfully paired, didactically, with "Skunk Hour" and other poems of sadness and depression in the database. Too, many of the poems in Thomas James's Letters to a Stranger would add contrast in attitude towards one's psychological aloneness.

1. Bate, Jonathan. John Clare : a biography / Jonathan Bate. New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.