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 vapours 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 loved 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.
John Clare.
If you have known me for a while, you’ll know that I fall in love very easily, and even more easily when the person I fall in love with, writes so beautifully, (or the thing that I fall for is such a wonderful poem) expresses so wonderfully, almost speaks what I want to speak without even having to say it. So after my love for Kamala Das, Sylvia Plath, Bronte sisters, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, (and of course some Urdu poets which I have come to know about very recently) now I have fallen for this very beautiful man/poet John Clare. Yes, he is my new love, and this poem is my very new addiction that I am reading again and again and yet again.
No, I am not cheating on the others, oh come on I could never do that. I think I just have an open relationship with all my lovelies. 😉
Moushmi Radhanpara 
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