I Am by John Clare

First published: 1848; collected in Poems of John Clare’s Madness, 1949

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“I Am” is a short poem of three six-line stanzas. Each stanza is regular iambic pentameter, rhyming ababab. The verse form is slightly unusual, not surprisingly for John Clare who experimented freely with different meters and forms. The poem begins with the simplest assertion of identity—“I am.” The reader knows only the bare fact of the speaker’s existence—no particulars are given. One does not learn who this speaker is and what his specific conditions are, though one is told in the first stanza that the speaker is friendless and forsaken. This speaker, paradoxically asserting his identity but providing no identification, repeats “I am” three times more in the opening stanza; however, he does so with qualifications that increasingly diminish his strange self-assertiveness. He tells the reader that no one cares who he is, that he has no one with whom to share his sorrows, and that he merely “lives,” tossed about as aimlessly as “vapours.” The aimlessness suggested by “vapour” in this final line of stanza 1 is powerfully reinforced by the enjambment, or running over, of the grammatical focus of its verb “tost” into the first line of stanza 2.

In the second stanza, the speaker is thrown helplessly “into the nothingness of scorn and noise.” This paradox of a “nothingness” that is noisy and scornful is immediately followed by the pure oxymoron of “waking dreams.” In this uncanny and contradictory world, the speaker likens himself to a shipwrecked sailor awash in a nightmare “sea” without a “sense of life or joys.” The speaker, drifting insensibly in this “nothingness,” now propounds his most fearsome paradox: Those whom he loves dearly are the most estranged from him. Although this stanza draws upon the conventional metaphor of shipwreck, with its suggestions of isolation and loneliness, there is evidence in this stanza that the speaker is not alone in his strange suffering. In fact, it appears that he suffers, in part, because he is not alone. Hostile (“scorn”) or indifferent (“strange”) witnesses may be present, but the speaker is separated from them as if lost at sea.

The concluding stanza confirms this, for the speaker now expresses a desire to escape to a world without men or women, without either joy or sorrow—a refuge of passive peace and detachment. This paradise is the past, the early years of childhood when the speaker imagines he was in unity with God and nature: “untroubling and untroubled.” In “I Am,” one encounters a nameless and faceless sufferer entertaining the impossible wish to return to the innocence of childhood. Exactly what and why he suffers is not known, but the terror and hopelessness of his sufferings are plain.

Forms and Devices

John Clare was the son of poor English farmers. At various times, Clare was a farmhand, a militiaman, a kiln stoker, and a mendicant. His formal schooling was slight, and until late in life, his access to books was limited. One book Clare knew early and well was the Bible, and its influence is especially evident in “I Am.” The Psalms are perhaps the best analogue for Clare’s testament of sorrow, for like the Psalms, “I Am” is at once personal and impersonal, impassioned yet restrained. Like the Hebrew psalmist, who expressed his de profundis within a highly formal system of poetic parallelism, Clare closes his lyrical passion and despair in almost perfectly regular iambic pentameter. The speaker of the Psalms is often unidentified, as is the speaker in “I Am,” and both tell much about the speakers’ sorrows but little about the speakers themselves. The characteristic plea of the psalmist to be delivered from his “gathered enemies” is also echoed by the speaker of “I Am”: He is surrounded by “scorn” and “noise” and, finally, in the closing lines, looks toward God for his deliverance.

The opening phrase of the first stanza, “I am—yet what I am,” may allude to the divine tautology of Exodus, “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). If this is so, however, the allusion is ironic, for the speaker of this poem asserts his identity despairingly, emphasizing his impotence and helplessness. The speaker’s description of being “tost into the nothing of scorn and noise” recalls biblical language describing the damned thrown into hell: “cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:10). Finally, the idyllic image of the sleeping child “abiding” with God echoes the confidence of the psalmist who hopes to “abide before God for ever” (Psalms 61:7). Certainly, in a more general sense, the simplicity and grandeur that have so often been noted in this poem owe a debt to the lofty cadences of the King James Bible.

From another perspective, “I Am” is a poem intimately connected with the sensibilities of its own era, for it expresses with great intensity the Romantic conflict between innocence and experience, a theme central to the poetry of Clare’s contemporaries. Clare is often compared to William Blake, since both were mystics who suffered eventual madness, but there is a more significant link between them. Clare shares Blake’s Romantic exhaltation of childhood. In “I Am,” childhood is figured as paradise before the Fall, a region in which there is no man (Adam) and no woman (Eve), only the isolated consciousness alone with God. The poem’s speaker seeks to recover the infantile condition of moral neutrality and irresponsibility free of the knowledge of sexual distinctions and the emotional extremes of either joy or sorrow. Recognizing Clare’s Romantic division of innocence and experience, one can appreciate the terrible irony of his reiterated “I am,” for the poem is really a passionate longing after “I was.” For William Wordsworth, Clare’s other Romantic analogue, adult experience involves a falling away from the glories of childhood, a diminishment with compensations of greater knowledge; but for Clare, adult experience is a virtual hell from which the only escape is a fantasy of return to childhood, even to a prenatal unconsciousness.