I AM - JOHN CLARE

I Am - John Clare

I Am - John Clare

Introduction

     John Clare was an English bard, who dwelled throughout the nineteenth century. He was born and increased in country Northamptonshire, and his country dialect suffused much of his poetry. Shortly after the thriving publications of his first two books: “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery” and “Village Minstrel and Other Poems,” country verse went out of vogue, and his later publications didn't manage well. John Clare would end up in two distinct asylums subsequent in life, due to diverse psychological pressures(Chilcott 2005). “I Am” is one of the verses he composed throughout magic charms of lucidity while he was at the mental institution. This term paper takes an analytical outlook of the poem.

 

Discussion

     “I Am” is a verse of acrid laments, melancholic contemplations and impossible longings. John Clare composed this verse while He was institutionalised in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he expended the last 20 two years of his life. Clare's rustic verse had conveyed him substantial good status and riches, which endowed him to get away the meagre subsistence he had renowned up until that time(Clare 2002). After some years, his country method of verse was no longer in vogue, and his verse contacted with little achievement (John 2003). Psychological stresses producing from the require to make cash to feed his family, his labour to acclimatize his verse to the altering times and his incompetence to reconcile his country district with built-up London, which his good status had acquainted him with, took its toll on his sanity, and directed to magic charms in two distinct asylums—the second of which spanned two decades and was terminated by death. The verse rotates round attenuating components surrounding Clare at the time, and his whole life. The first stanza is an investigation into the persona of self, which is focused by the multiple repetition of the saying 'I am' in that stanza. Clare isn't the first individual to seem this way, and he certainly won't be the last. That age-old inquiry that slews of contemplative and dejected men have inquired themselves—who am I really? Why am I here? Immediate happenings in Clare's life at the time performed some components in the creation of this verse; an demonstration is the second line of the first stanza: “my associates forsake me like a recollection lost;” Clare was forsaken by his associates and family while he was in the lunatic asylum, and had no intimate familiarity to solace him throughout his stay there. He then states that no one assists to alleviate his agony in the third and fourth lines of the first stanza: “I am the self-consumer of my anguish, they increase and disappear in oblivious host,” he makes quotation to his insanity in the saying “oblivious host” which purports that he's generally ignorant of the happenings happening about him because of his weakened reason(Clare 2003). There's furthermore the quotation to a loved one: “like shades in ...