John Clare, a Tortured Soul

For my first analysis, I have chosen John Clare's Romantic poem I Am.  Written in late 1844 or 1845 while Clare was institutionalized in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, the melancholic piece was first published in 1848.  I was drawn to the poem as an inquiry into the identity of self by a man who spent the last twenty-two years of his life confined to an asylum--doubly so when I learned that Clare spent many years believing himself to be other literary greats such as Lord Byron and William Shakespeare.  In short order I was fascinated.  What lay at the root of  Clare's psychological troubles?  How did his mental state affect his work?  Was he just another example of a highly gifted man plagued by madness?  As an individual known as Thoughtful Versifier writes on authspot.com "Clare isn't the first person to feel this way, and he surely won't be the last.  That age-old question that slews of contemplative and despondent men have asked themselves--who am I really?"  I had to learn more.

John Clare was born and raised in rural Northamptonshire--a memorial that stands in his honor there calls him "The Nothamptonshire Peasant Poet".  He began writing poetry in an attempt to save his parents from being evicted from their home, and his rural upbringing and experience as an agricultural child labourer served his fledgling writing career well.  He received high praise and much success with his first two books Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery and Village Minstrel and Other Poems, both of which were suffused with the rustic dialect of his style.  His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced" citing the way Clare so powerfully wrote of "nature, rural childhood, and the alienated and unstable self".  Shortly after the release of Clare's second collection of poems, however, rural poetry went out of vogue, and his next publications were unsuccessful.  The rapid shifts from moderate poverty to success to near-pennilessness appear to be the catalyst for the severe bouts of depression Clare began to experience.  Coupled with increasing alcoholism, a growing sense of alienation after a move facilitated by friends and London patrons into a cottage with his wife and six children seems to have escalated Clare's instability to include bouts of erratic behavior and a growing dissatisfaction with his own identity.  An ever-growing burden to his wife Patty and his children, Clare voluntarily entered an asylum for medical care.  While institutionalized, Clare re-wrote famous poems and sonnets by Lord Byron and claimed credit for Shakespeare's plays before returning to original works and producing perhaps his most famous poem, I Am.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXTSNe2vOI8&feature=player_detailpage

I Am, a poem of bitter laments, woeful contemplations and hopeless longings, is written in three stanzas of regular iambic pentameter.  The first stanza includes the repetition of the phrase "I am", an indication of the author's inquiry into identity of self.  The second stanza appears to describe his mental condition:  his confusion and dementia "Into the living sea of waking dreams", his depression "Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems".  The third and final stanza is comprised of religious imagery.  Perhaps due to a lack of understanding of mental health diseases in the 1800's, this stanza appears to be Clare calling on God to ease his affliction and illustrates the author's hope for a spiritual afterlife or at least a peaceful "sleep" or rest entombed in earth.

After considering which analytical role to adopt for my analysis of I Am as directed by my instructor, I settled on The Marxist, not so much for any socioeconomic issues raised in the work (there appear to be none), but more for the socioeconomic issues that so greatly impacted Clare and ultimately led to the writing of the poem.  Clare may have been born with a predisposition to depression and alcoholism, he may have suffered from bouts of melancholy under the best conditions--most artists do--but I believe his progressive mental illness was largely fueled by the situational depression he suffered as a result of the realities of the socioeconomic conditions of England in the early 19th Century.  He was a writer that pulled himself out of poverty through his art, suddenly incapable of supporting himself or his family when the market for his work no longer embraced him.  Once a rural child labourer, he knew success both critical and financial for a short time before being plunged back into poverty and near obscurity.  I read I Am as the beautiful yet heartbreaking lament of a man struggling both figurative and literally to rediscover who he is after the world has told him that he and his brand of art isn't what they want anymore.


References

Bate, Jonathan (2003) John Clare:  A biography; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Thoughtful Versifier (2009) Analysis of I Am; Authspot.com