I Am the Self-Consumer of My Woes

Clare, the moment I met you, I swear
I felt as if something, somewhere...
But try as hard as I might do, I don't know why
You get to me in a way I can't describe...

--with apologies to Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Clair"

As the world turns on a new season of "Penny Dreadful", on the 31 May, the first US broadcast of this paranormal horror episode, the Frankenstein creature named John Clare finally revealed to viewers more than a whiter shade of pale. Indeed, in a tête-à-tête with Vanessa Ives, the protagonist of the series, Clare introspectively and aptly recites the first stanza of a poem by the real but dead country poet, John Clare. And Ives, with somber heart, echoes the shared sentiments and completes Clare's recitation. Given Clare and Ives are both tormented souls for very different reasons, each is shackled in a destiny steeped in sad rage barbed by tangling shadow of despair. Dreadful.

Here is the real poet John Clare's poem:


I AM

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 shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

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 loved 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.


The titled episode for this BBC series broadcast on 31 May: "Above the Vaulted Sky"