The Adventures of a Slice of Chocolate Cake

A couple of days ago BlipBuddy Cathaber made chocolate and beetroot cakes (two of them) and she brought me a slice by a most circuitous route today at our BlipMeet in the cafe inside All Saint's Church, Northampton. We've met here before for a cuppa and cake though usually sit outdoors - too chilly today so we sat inside and noticed this poem.

Cath offered the cake to the bust of John Clare though I am pleased to say he declined, so it awaits in my fridge until tomorrow morning at coffee time.

John Clare (1793 - 1864) composed this poem while seated on the portico of All Saints Church between 1842 - 1864, at the time an inmate of Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, now known as St Andrew's Psychiatric Hospital, the UK's largest mental health facility. He died soon after completing his poignant words:-


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.
John Clare