John Clare

So I'm working my way through the shortlist of the books selected for the Mann Booker Prize 2009, and I just finished The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds. It takes place in 1840, in an asylum in Epping Forest, and is based on real events in the life of John Clare, the nature poet. I found it very affecting; the author vividly portrays the desperation and lack of control felt, not only by Clare and the other inmates of the asylum, but also the director Dr. Mathew Allen and his lonely daughter Hannah. Clare eventually escapes into madness and delusion, which actually seems a blessing given his brutal reality.

In real life, Clare was at first lauded for his original, rustic style but had fallen out of vogue by the time he published his third book of poetry. This critical neglect, (together with his alcoholism and depression) led to his spending the last 23 years of his life in Northhampton Lunatic Asylum, where he continued to write poetry, including the one reproduced below. I find this a sad and humbling poem.

I Am!

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 tost

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 smil'd 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.