I am

'I am' was a Knight transcript (KT) from the Northampton Asylum, therefore no original manuscript remains. However, whilst the KT is quite clear - the reading is 

'Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes' 

The poem was published in a whole list of periodicals from when it was written, likely in 1846. In these periodicals changes were often made at the whim of the editor(s), so several 'versions' come down to us.  There are a number of mis-readings of Clare’s original text too (remember it has not survived) that scholars have suggested, nearly all due to Clare’s handwriting.  So this is our best ‘educated guess’:

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. 


The punctuation would be Knight’s, as Clare rarely punctuated his work.  Even this text is open to debate, for instance Knight’s ‘n’ is very much like his ‘u’, so ‘oblivions’s host’ might well be ‘oblivious host’ (5).  Knight has ‘lost’ for ‘tost’ (6), but this is a understandable misreading of Clare who hardly ever crossed his ‘t’…. and so on, and on, and on ………