John Freeman, an English poet and critic born in 1880, wrote in the plain-spoken Georgian tradition, which valued direct feeling and close attention to the natural world after the ornate late Victorians. His poem “All that I was I am” appeared in the early 1920s in Poems New and Old, a period when many readers were re-examining what had been lost in the war and in their own earlier lives.
The poem begins with a speaker almost tempted by bitterness: “Hateful it seems now, yet was I not happy?” That first question turns the poem away from regret before regret can settle. The speaker admits he was starved of the things he loved, but he did not know he loved them, and he was happy lacking them. The central idea is not that the past was easier than it looked, but that the present self has no right to disown the past self. What he lacked and what he enjoyed belong to the same life, and both made him who he is. Bitterness, the poem suggests, is a kind of hellish forgetfulness—forgetting that one was happy and accusing Fate instead.
Freeman’s construction is quietly deliberate. The lines move mostly in iambic pentameter, the steady cadence of serious self-argument, though occasional variations keep it from sounding like a sermon. There is no strict rhyme scheme, but the poem repeats key words as if to prove its own argument: happy returns in the fifth line, and tree closes the seventh line and then the poem. These echoes make memory audible; the words come back, just as the speaker’s “old childish joy” comes back. The thirteen-line shape also matters. It is almost a sonnet but not quite, as if the speaker has talked himself past the border of conventional complaint and into something more open.
The poem’s language is deliberately plain, yet it carries weight. The phrase “Himself himself” is the centre: the doubled word insists that identity is cumulative. “All that I was I am” is therefore not nostalgia but a refusal to split the self. The closing image of “a green field or a green tree” is almost bare, and the repeated adjective green is the colour of living growth, not of decoration. The speaker does not need a more elaborate landscape because the point is recognition—the same childlike directness that once saw green things now sees them again.
Freeman also frames this struggle in spiritual terms. Fate is personified as something that “sits and nods and laughs,” a false authority that invites resentment. The speaker urges himself to let accusation sleep, lest God’s finger point from the cloud. To despise one’s past is not only painful but presumptuous; it questions the shape of the life one has been given. The poem’s significance lies in that double honesty. It does not pretend the early life was full, but it recognises that happiness can exist inside lack. And it offers a mature peace: the person we were is not an enemy to the person we are, but the only ground on which present joy can stand.