Funeral Speech following a Suicide

[Doctor]

We have had quite a number of requests for a poem or some lines to say following a funeral. It has been very tough to find something suitable, butafter scouring the second hand bookshops I think that I may have found a verse may work.

It was written by John Clare in Northampton Asylum. I think that John had his fair share of problems. I have ammended a couple of the words to make it more suitable.

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I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My life forsakes me, like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is 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 loved the best
Are strange--nay, they are stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.