'Tis seen in flowers,
And in the even's pearly dew
On earth's green hours,
And in the heaven's eternal blue.
The third stanza marks a shift in “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” from a strict dichotomy between love and the material world, to the contradictory assertion that love can be found in nature. The contrast hinges on the changing significance of dew. In the first two stanzas, dew has symbolized ephemerality: the fact that everything in the world is temporary, especially when compared to an eternal God. Here, however, what matters most is the dew’s beauty. The “earth’s green hours” are similarly both beautiful and temporary. Clare is using “hours” metonymically, to stand in for “months.” Love can be seen in spring, when the whole world is green. The substitution of “hours” for “months” emphasizes the brevity of that period, and yet love is still present within it. Eternity, however, is not entirely absent from the natural world. Clare concludes the stanza by writing that love can also be seen in “heaven’s eternal blue.” This is the exception that proves the rule. Rather than the sole manifestation of love in the world, it is just one among many examples, all equally valid.
And where is voice,
So young, so beautiful and sweet
As nature’s choice,
Where Spring and lovers meet?
The fifth and penultimate stanza of the poem is the most difficult to follow. To paraphrase, Clare is saying something like: “where is there a voice as young, beautiful, and sweet, as when nature chooses for lovers to meet in springtime?” Clare personifies nature here and gives it an active role in love. First, nature makes the springtime, which is young, beautiful, and sweet just like a young lover. Nature here means the world of growing things. However, Clare also uses nature in a broader sense, to mean the nature of things, or the rules of this world. These rules choose for lovers to meet in springtime, a choice that creates a beautiful parallel between the youth, beauty, and sweetness of the season, and the lovers who feel the same way. The parallel makes it especially easy to “hear” love’s presence in the world.
Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,
The faithful, young and true.
The final stanza of the poem mostly parallels the first, with a few changes. Both stanzas cast love as “transcendent,” or as unconstrained by the limits of the physical world. They also both praise lovers for their ability to channel that transcendence with their loyalty and honesty. Lovers’ ideals—their desire to be together forever, and to maintain absolute honesty and truth in the face of a world that demands compromise and partiality—defy the limited mortal world. However, in the final stanza, Clare also makes a few changes to mark the poem’s movement away from a wholly transcendent model of love, toward a love that is also immanent, or present in the world. Most tellingly, he adds the word “young” in the final line, implicitly acknowledging that the transcendent feelings of love are related to youth, and thus do not exist independently from aging and death.
