I Am! (John Clare poem) Essay Questions

Discuss one example of figurative language in “I Am!” What is its significance to the rest of the poem?

In the first stanza, Clare uses simile to compare his fleeting emotions to “love’s frenzied stifled throes.” The image uses the sounds of sex to suggest a moment in which chaotic sounds rise to the surface and disappear just as quickly. At the time, the emotions feel overwhelming, but they necessarily come to an end.

What religious attitude does "I Am!" depict? To what extent would you consider it a Christian poem?

The final stanza of “I Am!” is explicitly religious. The speaker expresses his desire to be with his “Creator, God” in the afterlife. However, his relationship to religion appears more complicated than this reference suggests. In the first two stanzas, which express his profound distress, he never even considers calling out to God for help. In the final stanza, although he seems to believe in a kind of afterlife with God in line with the Christian heaven, he imagines it as solitary, rather than shared with other saved souls. He also ends the poem by imagining himself still on earth, between the sky and the grass, rather than up in the heavens. We might conclude that the speaker experiences God as a distant and comforting presence, rather than the active historical figure of the Christian Bible.