Sunday, April 20, 2025

The cure for being out of sorts

 Someone said that John Clare wrote the great poem about being out of sorts. It’s called “I Am!” It begins:

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?

 

You know the feeling. You are in the dumps, not at your best. You’ve got the blues. Clare says it’s like being tossed into a dream

 

Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys, 

     But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem

And all thats dear.

 

His cure: a wild place untouched by man and time alone.

His cure is mine.

• Source and notes: John Clare, “I Am!” is available at the Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43948/i-am

You can find more than one version. Clare’s manuscripts were eccentric. Various editors have sorted them in various ways.

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