Audience and Expectation in <i class="italic">An Invite to Eternity </i>

Although John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity” appears to be a direct address to an unknown and anonymous “maiden,” in reality the poem is a much more complex appeal to the reader, which takes on the guise of traditional love poetry only to subvert it. In many ways, Clare’s poem seems to emulate and echo more classical poems such as Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” in its direct entreaty to a young lover. However, unlike that earlier poem, Clare’s offers his “sweet maid” a less than appealing prospect for future life, presenting her with an “eternity” filled with apocalyptic landscapes and almost monumental human disconnection. Indeed, the very vision of eternity offered up to the maid departs quite drastically from the pastoral ideal of Marlowe’s poem as well as from the typical notion of Christian heaven. This subversion of expectations, as well as the use of antique word forms, seems to suggest a conscious appropriation of traditional and old-fashioned love poetry and the placement of the “maid” in the realm of poetic convention, as opposed to reality. Further, Clare’s hellish version of eternity bears striking resemblance to the world he presents in “I am,” a poem written several months earlier reflecting his isolated life in a mental institution, “forsaken” by his friends and loved ones. In this context, the strange and ominous world that Clare presents as “eternity” takes on a whole new meaning as a representation of his social death within the walls of the asylum. It also places his entreaties to the maiden in a new light – he is not necessarily addressing a real person, so much as the prospective reader who might restore to him his identity through reading his poetry, or the notion of love itself, which has abandoned him. Supporting this idea, the use of shifting tenses within the poem also indicates that Clare is not just talking about a future state of being, but one that he experiences in the present. Seen in this context, then, “An Invite to Eternity” takes on added poignancy, as an ill and lonely man’s desire for companionship through the darkness of insanity and beyond. In his appropriation of traditional poetic forms and structure, Clare invites and then rejects the reader’s expectations about the content of the poem, complicating the mode of its transmission from poet to reader through the veil of metaphor and convention.

The poem begins with Clare’s direct questioning of the maid, something that recurs in every stanza of the poem. Even in this very opening there are clues that what follows may not completely be what it seems because of the use of antiquated word forms, seemingly out of place in a poem by a self-taught, peasant poet: “Wilt thou go with me sweet maid / Say maiden wilt thou go with me” (1-2). Words like “wilt” and “thou” connect the poem more firmly back to classical tradition and poems such as Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to His Love” which begins in a similar vein (an entreaty to “come with me and be my love” (1)), but interestingly does not make such use of antique language. However, Clare’s use of this language clearly places his poem in a classical, traditional vein, an expectation disrupted by the following description the land he wishes the maiden to accompany him to, a place “of night and dark obscurity / Where the sun forgets the day / Where there’s nor life nor light to see” (4-7). A far cry from the “pleasures” of “valleys, groves, hills and fields” of Marlowe’s pastoral poem (2-3), “An Invite to Eternity” rejects the expectations its first two lines promise, exchanging the anticipated and conventional world of the romantic pastoral or the heavenly for the decidedly hellish and ominous. The stanza closes with an echo of the first lines – “Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me” – seeming perverse and almost ironic in the face of the world described in the lines previous (8). By bracketing his foreboding description of “eternity” with these questions to the maid, his departure from the norms these pleas promise becomes even more apparent.

The rest of the poem is concerned with describing the place the maiden has been invited to, only becoming more apocalyptic and frightening at every turn. Further, a shift in tense occurs in the second stanza, emphasizing the almost Biblically prophetic vision of a tortured landscape

Where stones will turn to flooding streams
Where plains will rise like ocean waves
Where life will fade like visioned dreams
And mountains darken into caves (9-12).

This shift from the simple present to the future might follow the traditional form of a love poem like Marlowe’s – a description of a future life of happiness would not seem out of place there – but because of the content of this description, the jump in tense is more noticeable and foreboding. Interestingly, this description is almost completely confined to the physical aspects of nature, except for line 11, which echoes “I am” in its discussion of life turned into mere “visioned dreams.” The earlier poem describes Clare’s feeling of isolation and lost identity as being a “vapour tost … Into the sea of waking dreams” (6, 8), a similarity which strengthens the knowledgeable reader’s suspicion that Clare is not talking just about the afterlife, but the waking death of his own illness and incarceration. Continuing on, the next lines of the poem lend even more credence to this idea, as Clare shifts back into the present tense and seems to describe a state familiar to him:

Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity
Where parents live and are forgot
And sisters live and know us not (13-16).

The word “this” in particular, repeated in subsequent stanzas, seems to imply that Clare is describing a world he already lives in and is not just speculating about the world to come. Though it is possible he is using “this” to refer to the world he has been describing throughout, it is also important that he is not referring to “this world” or “this place,” but “this sad non-identity,” an aspect of “eternity” that he has only cursorily mentioned in the lines previous. Additionally, “this” place “where parents” and “sisters live” and forget – in the present tense, significantly – bears uncanny similarity to the alienated world Clare occupies in “I am,” where he tells how his “friends forsake (him) like a memory lost” (2)and his most loved ones “are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest” (11-12). In this light, the presence of the maid as possible love object and companion becomes more and more poignant, as well as more abstract. Indeed, the maid, instead of being a real acquaintance seems to be a representation of the companionship Clare yearns for, but knows is impossible.

Clare continues in the third stanza to describe the “sad non-identity” and disconnection which plagues the place he describes, asking

Say maiden wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be
To live in death and be the same
Without this life, or home, or name
At once to be, and not to be (17-21).

While Clare’s description of “this strange” simultaneous life in death bears similarity to the Christian notions of heaven and afterlife, the ominous undertones of this description make this living death seem more ghostly and supernatural, negative instead of celebratory as we might expect a poem about eternity and love to be. And again, this description of “liv(ing) in death and be(ing) the same / Without this life, or home, or name” hearkens back to “I am,” and its description of Clare’s own “sad non-identity”: “I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows” (1). Just as those in the afterlife might “live in death,” Clare has died a social death, forgotten and isolated, “at once” alive “and not” (21). He has, by this point in the poem, moved away from the natural imagery that populates Marlowe’s poem and others like it, subverting the expectations attached to his “sweet maiden wilt thou…” lines. At the end of this stanza, however, he returns to describing the physical, albeit ghostly, world, seeing “things that pass like shadows – and the sky / Above, below, around us lie” (23-24). Here, the isolation has become nearly complete – “things,” unrecognizable as individual objects “pass like shadows” and the sky surrounds everything, making contact with the earth itself impossible. However, this isolation seems couched in almost positive terms: it is important to note that Clare prefaces this description of the physical with “yet,” placing the “things” and the “sky” as positive exceptions to the world of “strange death” and isolation.

In the final stanza, Clare returns to the themes of isolation and disconnection explored in the previous stanzas of the poem. Here, the isolation described earlier becomes even more profound, as Clare describes the “land of shadows” where one can “look – nor know each other’s face” (25-26). This seems even a step beyond the personal disconnection discussed in stanza 2, where “parents” and “sisters” forget their personal attachments, for now all beings are unrecognizable to one another. Even time has become alienated from itself, suspended and eternal, all times existing at once: “The present mixed with reasons gone / And past, and present all as one” (27-28). But, in spite of these grim ideas, Clare still continues to ask,

Say maiden can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead
Then trace thy footsteps on with me
We’re wed to one eternity (29-32).

This return to the conventions of love poetry, the happy ending and consummation, adds a parting shot of additional irony to the poem as a whole, for the future life we have seen for this couple is less than pleasant. Indeed, this ending, more clearly than any other part of the poem, directly mocks the notion of romantic and eternal love as traditionally presented by poetry and expresses Clare’s own bitterness and anger at his isolation from the world and from human love.

Throughout “An Invite to Eternity,” Clare invokes the traditions of love poetry, only to subvert these conventions, mocking the notions of love and eternity with sad irony and the truth of his own social isolation. The descriptions of the world he occupies are hardly appealing and Clare is well aware of this, knowing that such an offer would be made in vain if truly made at all. The straightforwardly presented horror of Clare’s world lies in direct contrast to the world of love he continually invokes, and the improbable triumph of love over isolation is nearly laughable in its impossibility. By complicating his poem’s mode of transmission through the filter of the maid and the frame of traditional love poetry, Clare’s portrait of isolation and social death becomes even more moving and poignant, for it is just as obvious to the reader as it is to Clare that such an offer of “eternity” would be unlikely to be accepted. And if it were, would it matter in an eternity where all faces look the same and parents pass by their children, unrecognized, like shadows?