Write a poem or song on the topic of our identity

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 shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live …

Clare’s later years were plagued by mental illness, delusion, and insanity, and ‘I Am’ was written in the 1840s when Clare was in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, isolated from his friends and family. The poem reflects this troubled period in Clare’s life. two-word title unfolds and subtly alters its meaning across the course of the poem. ‘I am’, opens the poem, only to be immediately followed by a dash, marking it as a self-sufficient statement about the self. Not ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’: simply ‘I am’. But then, once we reach the third line, ‘I am’ is being pressed into its more usual service: ‘I am the self-consumer of my woes’. Click on the link above to read the full poem and learn more about it.

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