10th
The Beautiful Poetry Of John Clare Collected And Shared By Tony Johansen
TO MARY
I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,
And yet thou art not there;
I fill my arms with thoughts of thee,
And press the common air.
Thy eyes are gazing upon mine,
When thou art out of sight;
My lips are always touching thine,
At morning, noon, and night.
I think and speak of other things
To keep my mind at rest:
But still to thee my memory clings
Like love in woman’s breast.
I hide it from the world’s wide eye,
And think and speak contrary;
But soft the wind comes from the sky,
And whispers tales of Mary.
The night wind whispers in my ear,
The moons shines in my face;
A burden still of chilling fear
I find in every place.
The breeze is whispering in the bush,
And the dews fall from the tree,
All sighing on, and will not hush,
Some pleasant tales of thee.
- John Clare
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Mary Joyce was the tender subject of many of Clare’s poems. His love for her lasted his whole life, and yet he never told her and her father forbade him to ever officially meet her. Clare came from poverty. Malnutrition stunted his growth to just 1.5 meters. He was taken from school at age seven to go to work. He taught himself thereafter. He eventually married and had seven children but depression and alcoholism got worse and he ended up in an asylum. He came to believe that he was the one who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that he was married to Mary and had 4 children with her, though he had still not “met” her. It was at the height of his insanity that he wrote what is arguably his greatest poem. It is called “I Am”. Here it is:
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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