Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people people being honest.

Yet more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And darktowns heap uo on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation.

It becomes difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

John Clare
I Am

Written in Northampton County Asylum

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 oblivions host,
Like shadows in love frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live - like vapours lost

Into to 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 lifes esteems;
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange - nay rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for for scenes where man hath never trod,
A place where women never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator God
And sleep as in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below, above the vaulted sky