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John Clare: I amI 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 - like vapors tossed
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;
Even 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 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.
Introspection in Victorian literature was, Gilmour has argued, inevitable as a
response to the dislocations of revolutionary change, but was also often viewed as regressive and unproductive. In this poem
the title of the sonnet, the four ‘I’s’ in the first line, immediately signal Clare’s preoccupation
with what Tennyson referred to as ‘private sorrow’s barren song’.
Written during the period
of his insanity, Clare's poem emphasises instead a deep ontological uncertainty: ‘I only know I am’ rather than,
like Arnold, echoing Goethe’s belief that happiness is finding what holds the world together within.
This uncertainty
is evident on the poem’s structural level. Although the rhyme conforms for the most part to the sonnet scheme, there
are lines which break this pattern, as in ‘I fled to solitudes from passions dream’ and the eye-rhyme and half-rhyme
of thrall/all. The break in rhymes accentuate the power of these words, which significantly appear before the abrupt repeated
‘but’. This is effective especially in line 5 where the sense of a chase/hunt is literalised through enjambment.
A constant use of dashes to break up structures similarly disrupts any sense of certainty.
This poem seems particularly
suited to the disorganised subjectivity of what Arnold saw as the "dialogue of the mind with itself", yet as Armstrong argues
this dialogue can be seen as the Victorian poem’s achievement in creating two poems in the same words, the lyric subject
being reclassified as dramatic object as we read, inviting the reader's analysis and interpretation.
In Clare’s
poem the doubleness is marked in the shifting between ‘I am’ and I was a being/spirit/soul, as the speaker investigates
his claim of simply existing ‘dull and void’.
‘Void’, figuring the speaker as absence is a
typically Victorian, perhaps protomodernist motif, but here it is also a reminder of ‘thoughts destroyed’. In
this sense, it offers a contrast to Wordsworth’s view in the Prelude (1850) that thoughts, even unfulfilled, are their
own glory.
The powerful rhyme between monosyllabic void and destroyed is an example of the way the quality of
verbalness, of reading and being made aware that the poem is made of language, is used almost metaphorically. The heaviness
of ‘plod’ and ‘dram’ for example with the latte word's suggestion of poison is a way of deepening
the image of earth as prison. This deepening of imagery, layer over layers, is also suggested by the heavy alliteration in
dull/dram/dullness/destroyed. Plod and chilled are almost onomatopoeic.
The traditional metaphor of earth as
prison is a thread which runs throughout the poem: ‘I fled’ ‘disdaining bounds’ ‘a soul unshackled’
‘debasing thrall’ the movement is from prison to a remembered freedom and back again, ‘that’s all’.
While the descriptive language and the absence of heavy metaphor seem in a way Romantic, the idea of nature as poisoning and
draining is antithetical to the typical Romantic spirit. As a ‘peasant’ Clare’s depictions of nature are
not idealised but show an awareness of the struggle for existence, not as the survival of the fittest but rather as the primal
curse of man.
The Victorians often lamented the loss of the romantic spirit – Arnold’s lament "Wordsworth
is gone from us" seems to be a pervasive view particularly during the early years. However, during the Hungry Forties this
was increasingly replaced with a concern to articulate the experience of the current generation.
The sonnet shows
what Morley described as the shaking beliefs which characterised the Victorian era. In a way the movement from ‘I was
a spirit’ to the finality of ‘I am – that’s all’ can be seen as tracing the growing inability
to believe. Clare does not seem to share the positive mood of the early Victorian who saw ‘honest doubt’ not only
as faith but as a sign of a critical mind, yet at the same time he does not echo Arnold’s ‘eternal note of sadness’.
As
Kingsley put it, having got rid of an interfering god, the Victorians faced a choice between an empire of accidents and an
immanent god. Clare renegotiates a content to the terms of self and maker. As the speaker remembers that he was once "a being
created in the race/of men" there is a shift to a more poetic language ‘o’er the space of earth and heaven’,
and a series of similes: like a thought, like my maker, like eternity. While this seems to identify a positive past belief
in a superior being, it simultaneously conflates this with the earlier reference to the real power of ‘soaring thoughts’.
As spirit/soul tracing creation, the speaker seems to see himself as his own maker.
Any Romantic belief in art
or thought as recuperating or filling the void is however, finally not possible in a post-Kantian world, where as Armstrong
has argued, art has become self-sufficient while representation is seen as a construct of consciousness.
The
Victorians were, in Armstrong's words, the first artists who felt that what they were doing was redundant in a world where
even creation is impossible because it always subject to reinterpretation and rearticulation. Here, the negatives have not
become the positives of George Eliot’s Positivism, and the loss of the hope of heaven is not balanced by a loss of ‘demeaning
fear’. The feeling of brief thanksgiving that "even the weariest river/winds somewhere home to sea" which Swinburne
described is undermined by the static present tense which cannot see the "present Past" but only ‘I am’.
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