Read by John Davies

John Clare was an English poet who lived most of his life in abject poverty. His life was marred by bouts of mania and depression, and for the final 23 years of his life, Clare was locked in an insane asylum. It was here he began to write poetry; ‘I Am’ was Clare’s final elegy before his passing.

I Am!

BY JOHN CLARE

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 that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath 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.

Read by Dave Luukkonen and Music by Tony Anderson

Walt Whitman is America’s world poet – a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, whose verse collection ‘Leaves of Grass’ marked a new era in the history of American literature.

Within Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road’ engages with important themes of freedom, the self and nature. The poem begins with the speaker setting out on a long brown path “Afoot and light-hearted,” for he is done with the routines, customs, and safe behaviours of his previous life, “done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms.”

Here, Whitman renounces a life devoted to the conventional pursuit of material success and embarks on the open road, the world before him. –

If you’d like to read the full poem, go here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem…