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In the first stanza of John Clare’s “An Invite to Eternity,” the speaker proposes an abyss of absences and contradictions, and invites a young maiden to join him there. The poem illustrates a type of madness, but gently – the speaker is wistful, not violent or brooding, and the space he creates not horrific, nor hellish, as he describes these visions, this eternal meandering that waits for them.

This is a place where a path can lose its own way, where things forget themselves. Why would the maiden want to join him here? His repeated entreaties almost seem sarcastic – there is “no life or light to see” (7)… want to come with?

Here all becomes its opposite. In stanza two the speaker presents vivid images of transforming landscapes, where plains become oceans and mountains become caves. However, in the middle of this sublime montage, he poses that “life will fade like visioned dreams” (11). This presents something more abstract, suggests a mental lanscape. This line, in constellation with the others, seems to pit these two things against one another. What does it mean, then, for life and dreams to be opposite?

Besides the lack of punctuation suggesting endlessness, there are other things going on formally in the poem that suggest a break into another realm. Toward the end of the third stanza images begin to make sense across lines, rather than being end-stopped. These compartments begin to dissolve… up until now the lines have seemed distinct, looking like stacked books, and here they begin to open.

The first instance of this appears across lines 22 – 23: “yet to see / things pass like shadows” and continues over the next several lines – one could read them “and the sky / above, below” (23–24), and passing into the next stanza, “around us lie / the land of shadows” (24–25), and finally “trace / and look” (25–26). The next two lines work in this way sonically but perhaps not deliberately, like misheard song lyrics: “face / the present” (26–27), “gone / and past” (27–28). This abrupt change from end-stop to enjambment seems to communicate a loss of linearity or of logical thinking. The grammar, too, is strange – line 24 reads “above, below, around us lie,” but what does “lie” refer to? There is something confusing also about the use of “nor” in line 26. The dashes are the only instances of punctuation, which enhances the fragmented nature of his musings. In terms of form and function, it makes sense that the grammar, punctuation, and syntax should be strange, because he is kind of losing it. The poem itself is the path reflexively losing its way.

He rambles as a clairvoyant would, some prophecy released from a jar. He has these visions of things that aren’t there, but even there, in those visions, these things are and are not. And then, for the last four lines, he returns to end-stopping. This serves to accentuate the finality of these last lines, particularly the word eternity. This brings to mind the final two lines of Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death (479),” which read, “the Horse’s Heads / Were toward Eternity.” In both poems the word itself, as it means endless, becomes a rather absolute ending, as it ends life. In a poem without punctuation, “eternity” simultaneously works as an ellipsis and a period. The eternity he envisions is not linear, although one can go deeper into it. His eternity is the unknown, a purgatory.