Aldwinckle, Eric, Letter, [7 December 1944]

Letter, Eric Aldwinckle.
Description: 
Letter to Harry Somers, containing a poem by John Clare

Tabs

Case Study: 
Creative Dialogue Across the Ocean: Eric Aldwinckle’s Letters to Harry Somers
Creator: 
Aldwinckle, Eric
Source: 
letter
Date: 
[7 December 1944]
Place: London
Collection/Fonds: 
Contributer: 
McMaster University Libraries
Rights: 
Copyright, public domain: McMaster University owns the rights to the archival copy of the digital image in TIFF format. Reproduced with the kind permission of Margaret Bridgman.

Identifier: 
00001608-6
Language: 
eng
Type: 
image
Format: 
jpg
Transcript: 

In sympathy my heart goes out as always to that labourer's son who died in an asylum, who so nearly knew but did not know -- he only hoped with longing, in what must have been an unfortunate unrevealing world to him, when he wrote.
I am!
Yet, what I am, who cares, or knows.
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
And yet, I am. I live,
though I am tossed into the nothingness of scorn and noise;
Into the living Sea of waking dream
where there is neither sense of life nor joys
but the huge shipwreck of my own esteem,
and all that's dear.
Even those I love the best are strange.
Nay, stranger, than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
Where woman never smiled or wept.
There to chide with my Creator,
God.
And deep as I in childhood slept
full of high thoughts, unborn.
So let me lie
The grass below,
above,
The vaulted sky.
John Clare.