I Am! (John Clare poem) Literary Elements

The speaker is presumably John Clare himself.

Three stanzas of six lines each, with a rhyme scheme of ABABAB. The poem is written in iambic pentameter.

In line 2, Clare uses simile to compare the speaker, abandoned by his friends, to a lost memory. Unlike a lost object, when the memory is lost, or forgotten, it ceases to exist. The simile thus suggests that the speaker's sense of self depends on social recognition.

In line 5, Clare uses simile to compare his woes to "shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes." They are full of energy and chaos, and yet, like shadows, they don't seem to fully exist.

In line 6, Clare uses simile to compare the speaker's mode of living to "vapours tossed / Into the nothingness of storm and noise." The simile stresses his feelings of insignificance and tenuous grip on reality.

In line 8, Clare uses metaphor to describe "waking dreams" as a "living sea." The metaphor emphasizes that his uncertainty around what is real makes the world tumultuous and difficult to navigate like the sea. He builds on this image in line 10, describing his failure to achieve his goals as a "vast shipwreck." The metaphor builds on the previous imagery to suggest that he ultimately floundered on the choppy sea of waking dreams.

Line 2, alliteration of /f/, "my friends forsake me"

Line 16, alliteration of /s/, "sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept"

Line 13-15, assonance of /o/, "I long for scenes where man hath never trod / A place where woman never smiled or wept / There to abide with my Creator, God"

Situational irony: The speaker's social isolation leads him to adopt a strange and unstable sense of slf that ironically ends up further isolating him even from those he once loved, who now seem impossibly different from him.

Lyric poetry

The countryside

Mournful

The protagonist is the speaker, and the antagonist is the indifferent social world that surrounds him

The major conflict is between the fact that the speaker lives, and the impossibility of living as someone with no clear sense of self and no connections to other people. He longs to resolve this conflict by ceasing to exist.

The climax occurs in the beginning of the final stanza, where the speaker confronts the impossibility of his situation by expressing his desire to cease existing and thus achieve peace.

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In the final stanza Clare uses understatement when he describes death as sleeping.

The first words of the poem allude to God's famous identification of himself as "I am that I am" to Moses in the book of Exodus in the Bible.

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The speaker's description of his failure to achieve his dreams as a "vast shipwreck" somewhat overstates the significance of the failure in an objective sense, although the loss is as catastrophic as a shipwreck for the speaker.

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