I Am! Yet What I Am None Cares or Knows
by John Clare

English poet. His first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was printed by Keats' publishers Taylor and Hessey in 1820. It sold well, and Clare was presented as a 'ploughman poet' in the mould of Burns or Robert Bloomfield. His next book The Village Minstrel, appeared the following year, but The Shepherd's Calendar (1827), The Rural Muse (1835) took much longer to write and did not sell. His poetry was neglected in the nineteenth century, but he is now firmly established as one of the major poets of the Romantic school, which included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron.

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I Am! Yet What I Am None Cares or Knows
by John Clare

Written in Northampton County Asylum

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 tossed

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 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.

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I Am! Yet What I Am None Cares or Knows by John Clare