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 shades in love and death's oblivion lost;

And yet I am, and live with shadows tossed

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 e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -]

Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

SYSTEMI 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.