“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is a poem about love by the English Romantic poet John Clare, written while he was an unwilling resident of Northampton Insane Asylum. Like all of Clare’s later work, it was never published during his lifetime, but since the revival of interest in Clare’s poetry during the twentieth century, the poem has become well-known. Clare describes love in abstract terms. He celebrates the emotion’s “transcendence,” or its status as a spiritual experience that cannot be contained by the world of things. Yet he also characterizes love as something present in the material world, especially in nature.
The poem is one of many poems Clare wrote about love over the course of his life. Today, Clare is best known for his unusually sensitive depictions of the natural world, and many of his nature poems emphasize the poet’s feelings of love for the natural world. For example, his famous sonnet “Summer Moods” begins, “I love at eventide to walk alone” and similarly, the first phrase of his sonnet “Emmonsails Heath in Winter” is “I love to see.”
Later in his career, Clare wrote many love poems about Mary Joyce, his childhood love. He also began writing more abstract poems about love; rather than describing a particular experience of love, these poems theorize about love’s essence. “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is a particularly interesting example of this movement in Clare’s work.
