I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, <br />My friends forsake me like a memory lost; <br />I am the self-consumer of my woes, <br />They rise and vanish in oblivious host, <br />Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; <br />And yet I am! and live with shadows tost <br /> <br />Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, <br />Into the living sea of waking dreams, <br />Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, <br />But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; <br />And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best-- <br />Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest. <br /> <br />I long for scenes where man has never trod; <br />A place where woman never smil'd or wept; <br />There to abide with my creator, God, <br />And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: <br />Untroubling and untroubled where I lie; <br />The grass below--above the vaulted sky.<br /><br />John Clare<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-am/
