I AM The Antidote Classic Poetry for Today

A Commentary on John Clares

Written in Northampton County Asylum

By CHRISTOPHER NIELD
Special to The Epoch Times

Feeling depressed? This poem takes us to the edge of
despair and shows us the way back to equilibrium.

Written in Northampton County Asylum

I AM! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I amI livethough I am tossd
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all thats dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strangenay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.

In Clares poem we hear the voice of a man at his lowest ebb. This is a man who hasnt merely lost
his friends and possessions, but is on the verge of losing his sanity too. In desperation he holds on
to the one thing he can be certain of: his existence. I am! he announces, simultaneously victorious,
crushed and astounded. The meaning of his cry ricochets and resounds in many directions. There is
an echo, for instance, of Gods words to Moses atop Mount Sinai: I am that I am. Its as if Clare
were not only asserting the fact of his being, but that his being is essentially divine, perhaps even
imperishable. As a poet, he may also be following the writer and thinker Samuel Coleridge, who
believed that Gods thunderous I am was heard in the masterworks of great artists, who were thus
singled out from the crowd as both Brahmins and untouchables. We can recognize, even identify,
with the symptoms of his mental torture. Although talking about mental illness remains taboo, most
of us have had, at some point, moments of profound unhappiness, during which the essential
boundary between perception and reality has blurred. For Clare, paranoia has taken hold, turning
his loved ones into zombies. A century later, the poet Sylvia Plath used the image of a bell jar to
convey the distorting effect of depression, and the glassy wall it erects between ourselves and
others. Theres now a curious, inadvertent, contemporary ring to the phrase I am the self-consumer
of my woes. Clare means that no one has any interest in his troubles, but the line makes me think of
the phobia-fi xated, professionally- miserable parade of people on talk shows, who indeed seem to
have made a consumer choice of being helpless and mixed-up. Today, happiness doesnt sell, and
misery gets all the attention. But what is the personal price of reducing oneself to a series of
pathologies to gain attention?
So whats Clares antidote to his wretched condition?
Incarcerated by society, he journeys in his mind to a landscape devoid of people. Is this
enlightenment or misanthropy? Blown this way and that by circumstance, above all he seeks a still
point. His desire for a place where a man has never trod signals a rejection of the world of action;
and a place where a woman never smiled or wept is one free of the endless uncontrollable
sway of emotion. Is such a life possible? Clares poem suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that pure
being flips into its opposite: annihilation. We can almost see him, spread-eagled on the grass, his
vacant eyes filled by heavenly beauty, ecstatically alive and yet disturbingly reminiscent of a corpse.
The vaulted sky is oddly enclosed, as if he were lying in a crypt. His urge for relief has become a
regression to childhood, and then beyond into the wombthat dark space prior to our fleeting,
miraculous awakening into life. Having begun with the proud God-like cry of I am he has come to
echo Job, the man victimized by his creator, and who cursed the very day he was born. if we feel
ourselves succumbing to depression we may want to embrace what Clare rejects. Mental health
is more than a sense of I am. It is the ability to assert oneself in the world of I do and the strength
to submit to the palpitating openness of I feel. Only maniacs and monks may know differently.
What the poem gives us is the chance to enjoy a moment of visionary clearness, a sort of cleansing
from noise and confusion, before we draw back from the brink, and summon our energies once more
to reconnect to the people around us. John Clare (1793-1864). The son of humble and almost
illiterate parents, Clare grew up in the village of Helpston in the north of England. Although he left
school at 11, he was an accomplished poet, and enjoyed some success before falling into ill-health
and debt. He died in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum.

Christopher Nield is a poet and freelance writer living in London.
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