Epistemological Crisis in John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity”

Blog Post 3

Gabe Fine

John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity” confronts a theme that feels distinct from the other Gothic dangerous love pieces we read this week. The conflict addressed actually seems to be a highly epistemological and ontological one. That is, while “The Demon Lover” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” each seem to function as cautionary tales of a sort, “An Invite to Eternity” seems rather to be exploring epistemological problems of the state of our being. Though the poem is framed by the influence of a form of the death and the maiden trope that Keats and “The Demon Lover” follow, “death” in this poem seems to rather become allegorical for deep-seated problems in life that Clare realizes.

            First of all, Clare immediately establishes a quality of illusion in his language: the narrator describes travelling “through the valley depths of shade/ Of night and dark obscurity” (3-4). Clare threads this notion of darkness as obscurity and/or a disguising of the true nature of things throughout the poem. Initially, the narrator seems to associate this darkness with some form of death, linking him with the tradition of death appealing to a maiden. In the third stanza, the narrator describes entering some state of non-being (with a nod to Hamlet: “to be, and not to be/ That was, and is not” (21-2)) in which one can see “Things pass like shadows” above (23). That is, in death, it appears that knowledge itself seems to fade, or at least alter. Perception becomes driven by shadows, which are not the thing itself (nuomenon). Though “the land of shadows wilt thou trace,” for all your efforts to outline just what is being perceived, people still will not “know each others face[s]” (26). For Clare, death, more than anything, seems to be characterized by an epistemological crisis in which things can no longer be fully known, but only traced.

The second stanza furthers supports this, by describing how in this place, objects, locations, and concepts themselves will lose whatever quality links them to reality: “stones will turn to flooding streams…plains will rise like ocean waves” (9-10). Even life itself will “fade like visioned dreams” (11). However, this line also points to a deeper crisis that seems to be immanent in this poem. That is, as death darkens “mountains into caves,” obscuring things themselves (signifieds) from our conception of them (signifiers), we may begin to see that there was never any connection between the two all along. That is, life itself was a “visioned dream,” and the obscurity of death is not all that different from the less obvious obscurity of life. Clare draws this connection when he writes, “this strange death of life to be/ To live in death and be the same/ Without this life, or home, or name” (19-20). Thus, the true crisis in “An Invite to Eternity” is not only that death is dark and unknowable, but also that death is an apocalypse, in its most fundamental sense (an uncovering) of the truth that the reality of life is just as Plato imagined it to be: shadows of the truth dancing on the wall. “Past, and present all as one…to join the living with the dead,” Clare writes, showing us in the end that “We” (death and the maiden, or death and life) are already “wed to one eternity,” which is and always has been the same. In life, as in death, all we can do is “trace [our] footsteps,” never quite knowing where we actually stand.


John Clare
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Valley of the Shadow of Death by George Inness
http://www.georgeinness.org/The-Valley-of-the-Shadow-of-Death.jpg