My Favourite Poem: ‘I Am’ and the Legacy of John Clare

TW: discussions of depression and death

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 shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live, like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams

Where there is neither sense of life or joys

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems

Even the dearest, those I love the best are strange

Nay, stranger than the rest

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman ne’er 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

It is widely acknowledged that our mental health and creativity are closely intertwined (perhaps because we’re encouraged to turn our struggles into art, or because of the notion that you need to have struggled in some way to be a decent creative… but that’s for another time). Art — whether that be poetry, painting, dance — can bring forth a healthy, unifying expression of experience that can help others to feel less alone.

But whilst depression and anxiety still nip at my ankles, I can’t do that. Not yet. I’m not quite out of the woods, but I’m not curled up under a tree either. And because I process my feelings and understanding of the world through writing, that worries me. If I couldn’t try to understand how I was feeling through creativity, would I ever be able to understand it at all?

But in ‘I Am’, I find something so deeply kindred in John Clare’s experience of depression. It allowed me to better process and understand how I feel without having to hurl my own experiences out on the page. ‘I Am’ comforts me in its unsettling melancholy — in its own maudlin way, it puts some perspective on my feelings. People have felt the same, even Clare writing in the 19th century. And how perfectly described these feelings are: the strange dissociation from loved ones, the slow and scary untethering from joy, and how life-alteringly muffled and incomplete the world seems.

The isolation so burningly felt in ‘I Am’ is a timely chime. It reminds me how humans need to be together, to be understood, and to be loved. At this point in his life, Clare was far from those he loved. Almost a decade earlier, in 1837, he was removed from the family home and placed in a psychiatric hospital (what was then known as an ‘asylum’) after a breakdown in his mental health. In his letters from this point up to his death, he desperately asks after his family and old neighbours, and likens the asylum to the Bastille.

Estrangement and isolation are themes that run throughout much of Clare’s other poetry for an array of personal and political reasons. Born in 1795 in rural Northamptonshire, Clare was the son of an agricultural labourer and spent his youth working in the fields outside of his home village, Helpston — the emotional compass of his world. Often, Clare felt disconnected from this land, his home, and the people around him. Not only did his writing set him apart from his community, but vast swathes of common land around Helpston were cut off and sold to private landowners as the last dregs of the Enclosure Acts came into force.

But I do think Clare’s connection to the land and his community make him one of the most fantastic nature poets of all time. He was first propelled to fame through ‘peasant poetry’, the rather patronising nineteenth-century fad that championed ‘genius’ poets from poor or uneducated backgrounds. Despite this, Clare explores nature in a grounded, realistic way, often in his heavy Northamptonshire dialect. It’s far from the metaphorical, detached musings of more famous Romantic poets. Clare admired the work of his contemporaries, but said of Keats "In spite of all this his descriptions of scenery are often very fine but as it is the case with other inhabitants of great cities he often described nature as she appeared to his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed the things he described."

This simple, realistic nature is what Clare wishes to return to in ‘I Am’: the last verse, he wishes for an escape to scenes ‘where man hath neve trod’ — perhaps elsewhere from the now sliced-up fields of Helpston. It is a desperate wish for escape that is a stark reminder of how low you can feel.

John Clare died of a stroke on the 20th May 1864. After over 20 years in psychiatric care, he was finally free to roam ‘the unvaulted sky’. But don’t let ‘I Am’ define Clare in a singular, tragic light. As I mentioned earlier, Clare is one of the most brilliant nature poets of all time. From the goldfinches nestling in the eaves of his childhood home, to wagtails skipping in the rain, he describes his world with a rare connectedness. If anything, the legacy of ‘I Am’, and indeed John Clare himself, reminds me that although my mental health struggles can feel like my entire being, a blot bleeding like ink until I’m full of ‘scorn and noise’, that’s not the case. There are other parts to me. I am more than how I feel.

And for Clare, much like me, his writing was how he made sense of life throughout his own, until his death. Inscribed on his gravestone in Helpston churchyard are the words a poet is born not made. For him, writing didn’t have a condition attached to it: it wasn’t hinged on money, or fame, or a desire for knowledge. He just had to exist in the world, and that was enough.