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 shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has 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 (1793-1864)
These are known as Clare's 'last lines'; 
written with other poems during his stay in
the Northampton County Asylum from 1842 until
his death.
--I also have to add, now, in 2003, that I 
first read this poem in a final exam during 
one of my junior year Lit classes at Michigan 
State University, and when I read it, a first 
time read for that final, it almost brought me 
to tears...it struck home with me, and I keep it 
here because it still strikes very close to who 
I am, and how I think. I loved the poem at first 
sight, had to collect myself to write a good Finals 
essay on it, and never, ever forgot it. So now it's 
here, and it still strikes the same cords in me, and 
probably always will...-Kim--