- Heard in a Violent Ward (1990) baritone, piano 23'
- Text: poems and letters by John Clare
- Premiere—1993, by Larry Weller and John Churchwell, Saint Paul, MN.
- To James Hipkins (1860)
- There is a charm in solitude that cheers (before 1856)
- Byron's Funeral (1825)
- To Chas. Clare (1849)
- To Mary Collingwood (1850)
- I am (1840s)
- To James Hipkins (1860)
Program Note
A peasant poet, the son of a Northamptionshire farm laborer, John Clare achieved a certain fame through the publication in 1820 of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, and The Village Minstrel, which appeared the following year. Bloom and Trilling call him "a genuine visionary of nature," acknowledging the poet's narrow range, but pronouncing the work "intense and pure." "That sweet man, John Clare" as Roethke called him, entered the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum in 1841, the victim of acute bi-polar disorder. He lived there, and was treated well and allowed to continue writing, until his death.
Selected from various sources, this cycle includes observations on Byron's funeral train, Clare's best-known poem, "I am," and his last, poignant letter. It is dedicated to baritone Lawrence Weller.
The copyrights to some of Clare's letters and poems are owned by Eric Robinson. One which is P.D., however, is "I am."
Text
VI. I AM (1840s)
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 oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes:—
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tost
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 lifes esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love 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.