A diehard vow

Amos Adams

Consider typical Christian wedding vows.  Something like: I take thee, to have and to hold, from this day forward, in sickness and health, for better or worse, until death do us part.  And then compare that with John Clare’s An Invite to Eternity.  It is a poem that can easily be viewed as strange, creepy, dark.  But I think that comparing it to the aforementioned wedding vows can help bring the key point of this poem to light: eternity.  Whereas the Christian vows end at death, the poem proposes something much more romantic.  The two will be together forever. 

            Strangely enough, the most binding and appealing part of Christian wedding vows, I would argue, are the negatives.  Sure, anyone can stay together in the better times, through health.  But what about in sickness?  Can you handle to stick it out through then?  What about through the worse times?  What about through the times in the “valley depths of shade/Of night and dark obscurity/Where the path hath lost its way/Where the sun forgets the day” (3-6).  Can you stick it out through those times?  See what I did there?  For this reason I see this poem as a distillation of love.  Words that try to get past all the fluff we coat it with.  I think that the third stanza is particularly helpful in illustrating this.

Say maiden wilt though go with me

In this strange death of life to be

To life in death and be the same

Without this life, or home, or name (17-20)

The speaker and the maiden will be going past the “death of life.”  I would argue the life being referred to is the sensory life.  Words, thoughts, feelings, emotions.  The speaker is not interested in them (“Without this life or home or name”).  He is interested in what will come after.  I hesitate to use the word “after” here, because this poem is also relatively detached from our notion of time, as we can see in the last stanza.  “The present mixed with reasons gone/And past, and present all as one” (27-28).  The first line of this excerpt further goes along with this idea of the speaker wanting something (again, I argue it might be called love) that goes past “reason.”  And then line 28, I believe, better encapsulates his idea of “eternity” than the traditional notion.  Eternity is embedded in the love I am trying to explain.  It is timeless.  Something so in the moment that nothing else matters.  Feelings from the past, too, change, and become one with the irreversible present.  Future?  Who said anything about future? The momentary connection exists—in the speaker’s asking a million dark questions after “Wilt though go with me sweet maid…”—within this moment lies the eternal.  It is why nobody says “probably” on their wedding day.  They say yes.  They say I do.

            No darkness, no shadows, no evil unapproachable in the hands of this love.  It changes someone.  It changes two people.  It changes all who feel it.  Say, for example, a divorce happens.  The love does not die.  It has changed both parties irrevocably.  And it will change the way they treat people in the future.  Again, this distilled, fleeting love.  It, it would argue is what connects, or “[joins] the living with the dead” (30).  It’s a love poem, for crying out loud.  A darn good one.  Why must we think love can’t seem dark.  Can’t see scary, creepy even?  Love does drive us into insanity.  Let it be shown.  Let there be more of this.