Existence
“I Am!” presents existence as the speaker’s one certainty. The opening line hinges on the difference between being—“I Am!”—and identity—“I am someone who.” In this sense, existence is the speaker’s curse. He knows that he is alive, and sees his emotional instability and social isolation as inevitable as long as he continues to exist. Yet reality also feels quite unstable as the poem progresses. Many of the poem’s images—shadows, vapours, memories, dreams—have tenuous claims to reality. They are impossible to touch or hold, and can fade out of existence without leaving a trace. The speaker’s social and emotional life similarly inhabit the boundary between existence and nonexistence. At any moment he can disappear from the lives of his loved ones, and at any moment his emotions can flare up or vanish. Rather than anchoring himself to the certainty of his existence, Clare seeks to free himself of it. In the third stanza, he expresses his longing for a death that would enable him to disappear into the grass and the sky, no longer weighed down by the certainty of existing that begins the poem.
Identity and Social Isolation
One of the most important ideas in “I Am!” is the assertion that having a stable identity depends on recognition from others. The speaker is confident that he exists, but cannot describe what he is because he has been forsaken by his friends, while others are simply indifferent to his existence. Clare thus suggests that one’s sense of self is actually a product of how other people perceive you. This is especially true for emotional experience. The speaker suffers a string of “woes,” yet he lacks someone to share them with. Instead, he becomes a “self-consumer,” a closed system in which he is the only consumer of the emotions he produces. Rather than enabling him to see his own grief more clearly, this isolation makes his emotions feel unreal, transient, like figures in a dream. Clare compares this experience to that of navigating an “oblivious” crowd. Surrounded by people and yet recognized by none of them, you feel like you could disappear and nothing would change. The oblivious crowd the speaker navigates renders his emotions similarly intangible.
Grief
Grief lurks behind every word of “I Am!” The speaker only explicitly references it once, when, in the first stanza, he speaks of his “woes.” Yet even here he focuses on the instability of those feelings, rather than the fact that they are feelings of grief. Although the speaker expresses frustration at the nature of his sadness, he seems to entirely accept the fact that he is sad. In the second stanza, we get a better sense of at least one source of his grief: “the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems.” The speaker sees himself as a failure whose social isolation and tenuous grip on reality has led him to abandon all his goals in life. The friends who have forsaken him, and his own sense of profound distance even from those who he “loved the best” constitute two other potential reasons for his woe. Yet the poem treats sadness as more than a response to particular situations. In the final stanza, although the subject matter is more abstract, the language of longing, loneliness, and childhood nostalgia still creates a mood of profound sadness. It is the lens through which the speaker sees the world.
