I am

As I was driving over to see John someone read out this fantastic poem by John Clare as part of Radio 4's History of Britain through Poetry. I'd been listening on and off through the day since I'd managed to buy a new radio - and then batteries duh - to listen outside as I finished off the dreaded Brick Road (see The Rake's Progress earlier).

The extras are the Japanese Anemones in the garden that I have been religiously dead-heading in the hope it would bring a buyer or just a viewer to our lovely house and our little harvest of squash for the winter - featuring the fabulous Golden Hubbard which keeps til February and has an excellent flavour roasted or in soups.

'I am' is devastatingly sad. Clare ended his days in a 'lunatic asylum' but it also echoes - at least according to Andrew Marr who fronted up the day - the plight of the rural poor in England under the Enclosure/s Acts that robbed them of their common land and way of life.

Here it is

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.