Death and Marriage: One Eternity

The poem “An Invite to Eternity”, written by John Clare, illuminates the interesting theme of loss of identity. In this poem, death and loss of identity appear to be equated. The speaker in the poem seems to have forgotten who he is, and invites the maiden he is attempting to seduce to forget with him. The speaker asks, “Say maiden wilt thou go with me / Through the valley depths of shade / Of night and dark obscurity / Where the path has lost its way / Where the sun forgets the day / Where there’s nor life nor light to see” (2-7). Here it is demonstrated that even something so intertwined with another, the sun with the day, can forgot the other thing. The forgetting of the day is paralleled in the speaker’s forgetting of himself. He no longer knows who he is and his identity seems to now be separate from himself, two things we would consider intrinsically connected. He also says “Where the path has lost its way” demonstrating that the speaker has also lost his way in losing who he is. Additionally, the death imagery in this quote is quite apparent, as it is throughout the poem. For instance, “the valley depths of shade / Of night and dark obscurity” could be referring the biblical passage about “the valley of the shadow of death.” The valley of the shadow of death is a place so terrible one feels as though they are standing in death’s shadow they are so near to it. This suggests that the speaker is asking the maiden to experience death with him and to suffer the pain he feels, most likely at having lost his identity. Even more clearly suggestive of death is the line “Where there’s nor life nor light to see”. The speaker wants the maiden to join him in death, and perhaps lose and forget her identity as well, a very atypical proposal for a man who supposedly loves a woman.

The odd term used in the poem, and the one that has the potential to change its entire meaning is the word “wed”. The word clearly implies marriage and being bound to each other. It is possible that the speaker is actually asking the maiden to marry him, in which case it is marriage that becomes equated with loss of identity and death. The speaker says, “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). The occurrence of the words “living”, “dead”, and “wed” so close to each other in the poem indicates that they are closely linked. This shows that while obviously the speaker and the maiden would be living after being married, merely living is no life at all. Their identities would be lost to the marriage, being “wed to one eternity”. And as losing one’s identity has already been equated with death in this poem, it becomes apparent that so too are marriage and death equated. Therefore, in asking the maiden to join him in death, the speaker is asking her to join him in losing their identities to one eternity that they would share together in marriage.

"The Last Man" -John Martin

https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/jmartin.htm