An Illustrated Invite to Eternity-key

John Clare's An Invite to Eternity has a complex publication history as well as a complex vision of audience and transmission. Pinning down the poem's meaning, or imagined mode of transition, or particulars about its composition seems almost impossible - nothing has one single meaning. My final project seeks to address these issues by representing some of these conflicts and possibilities.

I have illustrated segments Clare's poem and put these illustratations, along with Clare's words, into book form in order to present my interpretations of some of the issues at work in Clare's poem. In my illustrations, I touch on themes discussed in both my E1 and E2. Most basically, perhaps, I am addressing the issue of unadulterated Clare vs. standardized Clare, unifying the publication history of the poem and modes of interpreting the poem itself. I have done this by separating the poem into two interrelated strands of interpretation - the unadulterated Clare writing An Invite to Eternity as a reimagining of his incarceration in a mental asylum and the "standardized" Clare, whose poem is more literally about heaven and love (and has punctuation).

In order to illustrate these multiple layers of Clare's poem, the book's pages themselves have 2 layers - gouache paintings on paper and line drawings on plastic transparencies. The paintings are small vignettes that illustrate something about the interpretation of the poem as a veiled description of the mental institution, or insanity itself. Along with the painted image, these paper pages include words from Clare's poems in the "raw" Robinson version - as close to unadulterated Clare as we can get. (see example below)

The transparency line drawings, on the other hand, illustrate the more literal level of interpretation of Clare's poem, as a work about heaven, death and love. Further, this page also adds the standard punctuation (as in the version printed in 1949 by Geoffrey Grigson) to the words underneath on the paper page (you can see this below in the added comma after "maiden"). These line drawings try to mirror some of the shapes and the composition of the gouache underneath.

The two sets of images, overlapped like this, are not just composed complimentarily for aesthetic reasons, but because of the close interrelation of the two layers of meaning at work in the poem. By viewing the two images and these two interpretations at once, the overall richness of Clare's poem becomes more physically obvious.

In many ways, the project of this illustrated version of An Invite to Eternity mirrors some of the problems facing Clare scholars - which way should we see the poet and his poems? Which version of Clare's poems should we read - "raw" or edited? What Clare persona do we priviledge - peasant, madman, or Romantic poet? My attempt to illustrate some of the multiple layers within An Invite to Eternity addresses what happens when we look at two versions, two sides at once.

Look at An Illustrated Invite to Eternity