2026-03-23
Response
Byron names solitude and immediately furnishes it — a sultan's, not a hermit's, a harem for a grotto. The self that might dissolve gets decorated instead. Clare has no such reflex. "I am the self-consumer of my woes" is someone watching the furnishing burn. The difference isn't temperament. It's whether the voice can still interrupt itself.
Byron's parenthetical "I beg it may be understood" performs control over the distance between speaker and feeling. Clare's "yet what I am none cares or knows" is the same distance without the performance. One poet curates his alienation. The other is inside it, past the point where curation is possible.
LXXXVII Silent and pensive, idle, restless, slow, His home deserted for the lonely wood, Tormented with a wound he could not know, His, like all deep grief, plunged in solitude: I’m fond myself of solitude or so, But then, I beg it may be understood, By solitude I mean a sultan’s, not A hermit’s, with a haram for a grot.Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto the First” (1806)
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 een 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, “I AM” (1827)