Summary
The first stanza of "I Am!" expresses a crisis of identity. Clare articulates that he exists, but that the nature of his existence is a matter of little interest to everyone around him. Those who were once his friends have not only left him behind, but utterly forgotten that he ever existed. Alone, he is left to be “the self-consumer” of his own woes; when he feels grief, he cannot express it, but instead must merely return back within himself. His grief thus seems to rise from nowhere and vanish just as easily, a frenzied shadow. Yet despite this untenable instability, Clare remains alive.
In the second stanza, he elaborates on the nature of that life. His life is like a vapor or mist amid the scorn and noise of other people. He feels like a person in a dream, or like a ship lost at sea, without landmarks to ground him in reality. In this churning sea, even those he truly loves feel like strangers.
In the third stanza, he shifts from describing the present reality to articulating his desires for something different. He says he longs for a place where no one has ever been. There he would be alone with God and sleep sweetly, like a child, neither a bother to other people nor bothered by them in return. He could lie forever with the sky above and the grass below.
Analysis
"I Am!" is a poem about identity, social isolation, and grief. The first stanza plays cleverly with the phrase “I am.” We assume that “I am” will introduce a descriptive statement about the speaker—I am lonely, or I am a poet. Instead, Clare cuts himself off, leaving “I am” on its own, as an assertion of existence. This move parallels the famous name of God in the Old Testament, “I am that I am.” Yet rather than the exalted individuality of the Biblical God, Clare’s existence is a matter of no interest to those around him.
Clare thus doubly subverts our expectations in the poem’s opening line. He neither describes himself, nor celebrates his own existence. Instead, despite the boldness of the two-word sentence “I am,” he depicts himself as fleeting and insubstantial. The second line, “my friends forsake me like a memory lost,” encapsulates this tendency towards self-negation. The simile stresses that his friends have not only left him behind, but forgotten him utterly. The image of an absent memory forms a poignant example of true impermanence in our world. As Clare recognizes, we constantly forget things without even realizing we have lost the memory, so that the memory disappears from reality without a trace. He suggests that his own existence feels equally unstable, equally dependent on those around him.
Indeed, most philosophers today would argue that absolute individuality is an illusion. We are all products of the people who surround us. We adopt the traits and interests of our loved ones and communities, and we understand ourselves partially based on how we are perceived. Capitalist cultures often ignore this, by instead depicting people as isolated “islands.” Clare gestures to this model of the self when he calls himself “the self-consumer of my woes.”
The nineteenth century was a period of intense industrialization. As a child of the countryside, Clare experienced this intimately. Some of his other poems respond to “enclosure,” or the division of the land into small parcels that could be bought and sold, and the subsequent flight of people from the countryside to the city. This mass exodus disconnected people from traditional social networks. In their place, it established people as producers and consumers. The purpose of life became working to manufacture new commodities, and then using your compensation to purchase those commodities. When Clare describes himself as a “self-consumer” he suggests that this new model of the self has infiltrated his emotional life. Rather than sharing his feelings with a broader community, he merely makes his “woes” and then consumes them, an isolated, closed system akin to that of the producer-consumer of the nineteenth-century city.
Yet rather than a stable, impervious individual, Clare describes this capitalist individuality as fundamentally fleeting and transient. The second half of the first stanza, and much of the second, are composed of a series of images that further flesh out the theme of the unstable self. Clare describes his feelings as members of an “oblivious host” and as “shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes.” These images combine impermanence with frenzied energy, like a chaotic subway station where people easily disappear into the crowd. In the second stanza, he compares his life to a stormy sea. The sea is boundless, without any clear landmarks or places to rest. Rather than a literal ocean, he describes it as a sea of “waking dreams.” Lost in the crowd, Clare finds himself unable to distinguish reality from fantasy. Like the deep ocean, this dream-like reality lacks any landmarks or places to cast anchor.
Within the ocean of waking dreams that is his life, Clare spots the “vast shipwreck of my life's esteems.” In other words, his inability to grasp reality has caused his goals in life to flounder and sink. More than this, his disconnection has perversely left him isolated even from those he does love. At the end of the second stanza, he returns to the first stanza’s explicit focus on community, and states “Even the dearest, that I love the best / Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.” Strange here means less “weird” than “unknowable.” Ironically, Clare’s isolation from the community renders him so unstable that he feels fundamentally different even from those with whom he does have a relationship.
In a sense, the first two stanzas delineate a trap that the speaker cannot escape. He exists, yet his existence is hemmed in by a social isolation that renders his self fleeting and unstable. He thus feels utterly different even from those he was once close to, making it impossible for him to repair his social isolation and regain a more stable sense of self. The climax of the poem comes at the beginning of the third and final stanza, in response to this problem. Clare abandons its terms, longing for a world where, rather than a stranger alone in the crowd, he would be truly free of other people, in a place where no one had ever been.
The image of a place where man has never been immediately suggests the afterlife. The speaker’s assertion that this is where he will dwell with his “Creator, God” further establishes that it is death he is longing for. Yet his vision of death is peculiar. It isn’t the Christian heaven, a place where the best parts of life continue forever. It’s closer to oblivion, an endless sleep. Clare’s afterlife is also specifically on earth. He longs to escape the isolating social world, but he still pictures himself amid the grass and the blue sky, in a place that resembles the countryside of his youth.
Nostalgia for childhood was a frequent theme in nineteenth-century poetry, especially among the Romantics. For example, Byron’s poem “Youth and Age” writes longingly for the sharp emotions, optimism, and intellectual honesty of childhood. Clare adapts this conventional theme towards a darker end, longing not for the creativity of childhood, but for the way he once slept, utterly peaceful, untroubled by the world.
By the end of the poem, then, Clare gets out of the trap of "I Am!" He imagines a mode of being completely opposite to the tumultuous form of life he describes in the first stanza. In the final stanza, his syntax carefully reinforces the loss of the self. The first person pronoun appears to describe the speaker’s present state, “I long for scenes,” and his childhood self, “as I in childhood sweetly slept.” Yet he delays using the word “I” to identify himself while writing about the death he longs for. The phrase, “there to abide with my Creator, God” instead pushes the subject, “my,” to the end of the sentence, making the self feel less important than the place “there,” the verb “abide,” and of course the emphatically identified “Creator, God.” In the poem as in his longings, the speaker disappears into the green world and its God, a final rejection of the self-consuming individual he has become.
