I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
The opening lines of "I Am!" use the ambiguities of English syntax to question what it means to exist. The phrase “I am” can be both the beginning of a sentence describing oneself, and a whole sentence on its own. The former use is more conventional, so the reader expects the first line to finish with the speaker telling us what he is. Instead, he breaks himself off mid-line, so that instead he states only that he exists. The difference between expectation and reality draws out the discomfort of not being able to self-describe; though “I am” is a sentence on its own, here it is not enough.
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host
Without any companions who care to hear about his feelings, the speaker in “I Am!” experiences them only partially. The second line in this quotation is a little ambiguous, but both meanings make sense in context. We can read the oblivious host as Clare’s community, who are indifferent to his feelings and thus feel like one vast, undifferentiated crowd. Alternately, the host might be the feelings themselves: a new woe rises up among similar feelings, like one person suddenly appearing in a crowd where no one realizes they have arrived. Because he has no one to whom he can articulate his emotions, he cannot think through their connections to one another. Instead, his woes remain discrete moments of strong feeling. Without a broader narrative to make sense of them, each of his woes can appear at a whim, and disappear just as easily.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God
The final stanza of the poem expresses a measured and distant yearning. Clare repeatedly uses the vowel “o,” a darker and slower sound that reinforces the more somber tone of these concluding lines. Here we also see the speaker in the process of thinking his way out of the catastrophe of the first two stanzas and reaching the conclusion that what he desires is death. At first, he expresses a longing for “scenes,” plural, where no man has been. Here, he seems to desire simply anywhere where people do not frequent. Yet by the next line, he has narrowed down to one particular “place” free of women as well as men. Finally, he reaches certainty with the word “there,” which draws out a particular location, as though Clare is pointing to it. This is the place where he could abide with his Creator—the peaceful quiet of a death shared with God alone.
