parlando

untroubled where i lie

Posted on May 9th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Words.

I ran across an old post, one of my favorite poems, by John Clare. Now I love it even more; it fills me with inner peace, and believe me, right now that's hard:

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 oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes:
And yet I am, and live -- like vapours toss't

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.

             --John Clare, c.1842

I know, it's distraught, not at peace. Clare was crazy, inside an institution. (And of course my friends have not abandoned me.) But I feel it; especially the longing, in the long past.

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