An Invitation to Your Cyclical Life

An Invite to Eternity
Mollie Wodenshek

In the Christian tradition, eternity can only be reached upon death of the mortal life. Thus the notion of eternity—unending time—implies the notion of death. Additionally, the Old Testament and the New Testament together create a circular narrative beginning with the fall from Eden and ending with Revelation and the establishment of a new Eden. This search for Eden is cyclical and so is the concept of eternity—unending and unchanging. An Invite to Eternity explores eternity as only reachable through destruction and as a cyclical existence.
The poem opens with the line “Wilt thou go with me sweet maid / Say maiden wilt thou go with me” (1.1-2). The use of repetition to begin the poem immediately places the reader in a still time where the beginning and end recur over and again. The last line of the first stanza again repeats the first two, “Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me” (1.8). This phrase is repeated two more times throughout the poem with its different masks. The constancy with which this phrase is repeated makes the poem as a whole appear unified and complete. There is a common ground which the poem keeps coming back to—in its cyclical nature.
The second stanza explores destruction. All the common entities of nature—stones, plains, mountains—will all burst from their forms and transform into something completely different. The most destructive line comes in the second half of the stanza, “Through this sad non-identity” (2.14). The narrator expounds the ultimate destruction of life and entrance into eternity is the loss of identity and furthermore the loss of the human form—“Where parents live and are forgot / And sisters live and know us not” (2.15-16). The ultimate symbol of eternity is in fact destruction. There is not differentiation in eternity, “and past, and present all as one” (3.28).
The poem concludes with the line, “We’re wed to one eternity” (3.32). The idea of being married to eternity reiterates the notion of never ending and never changing. For marriage is as eternal as the life we live, and in many cases extends into the after-life for 19th century British Romantics. Additionally, marriage as a sacrament of God nears on the end, the completion. For marriage unites two people in order to continue yet another cycle of life.