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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 - like vapors
tossed
Into the
nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking
dreams,
Where there is
neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my
life's esteems;
Even the
dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange - nay, rather
stranger than the rest.
I
long for scenes, where man hath
never trod,
A place
where woman never smiled or wept
-
There to abide with my
Creator, God,
And
sleep as I in childhood sweetly
slept,
Untroubling, and
untroubled where I lie,
The
grass below - above the vaulted
sky.nt>
JOHN CLARE
1793-1864
Written in Northampton County
Asylum
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