Answer

In the first line of the poem he explains how he exists, but no one cares. “I am -- yet what I am none cares or knows;”

He also explains how he has been thrown about by love, because at that time in his life, before he went to this asylum, he believed that he would be reunited with the first woman he loved.

When he went to find her, he would not believe when her family told him she had died three years earlier, claiming that he had children with her and that he was married to her as well as with his wife Patty. This all makes him feel unhappy, overall.