Summary
“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” isn’t exactly a poem where a lot happens. Instead, it's an extended meditation on love, without any real narrative or story. The first stanza begins with a statement about love: the emotion lives longer than the earth. The speaker sees the earth as a tomb, doomed to disappear one day just like the dew in the morning. Love's immortality provokes the speaker to profess his affection for lovers, who bring this powerful emotion into the world.
In the second stanza, Clare states that healthy people dream of love. Sleep, then, is one of love’s natural habitats. Even in the “eve,” or evening, when dew appears like tears, love still feels joyous to the person who sleeps and dreams of it. However, the third stanza stresses that love is also part of the waking world. We can see it in the beauty of nature, from the flowers, to the pearly dew, to the green growing things, to the deep blue of the heavens.
The fourth stanza continues to emphasize the possibility of using one’s senses to detect love’s presence in the world. It can be heard in the music of the wind which has been brightened by the warm spring sun. For the speaker, there can be no voice as young, beautiful, and sweet as the voice of nature in springtime, that time of year when the world comes back to life and new lovers meet. Nevertheless, at the end of the poem, Clare repeats the first stanza, once again emphasizing that love’s longevity transcends any individual being on earth.
Analysis
Characteristically, John Clare's “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is a deceptively simple poem. The poem is almost minimalist in its aesthetic, especially compared to the flowery Romantics: the lines are short, the vocabulary is limited, and the poem even ends where it begins, rather than taking off on a flight of fancy.
However, behind this simple exterior, we find a much more complicated work. At its heart is a conflict between the assertion that love exists separately from the material world and the assertion that love is something we can detect using our senses as we engage with the world of things.
The first stanza presents love as something separate from ordinary life. Immediately, Clare juxtaposes love, which “lives,” against earth, which he calls “the tomb.” We can read this pretty literally—the earth is where we bury people—but Clare also means it more broadly. The earth, he writes, “fades like dew”—in other words, everything in the world eventually disappears, just like the dew disappears when the sun comes out.
The earth’s impermanence is an idea that comes, at least partially, out of Christianity. Clare’s Christianity was somewhat unorthodox, oriented more around the natural world than traditional Church institutions. However, his writing remained fundamentally marked by the religious culture he grew up in. Christianity emphasizes that nothing in this world lasts forever, and thus encourages people to place their trust instead in an immortal God and in the afterlife, where some people get to share in that immortality. Clare’s description of earth as a tomb recalls this way of thinking about the cosmos.
Love, too, is an important idea in Christian thought. The Gospel of John asserts that “God is love,” meaning it was conventional for Christians to see God and love as interchangeable. Clare’s characterization of love as living further encourages this association. The Bible often stresses Jesus’s status as more alive than the world we inhabit. For example, it refers to him as “the living water,” in contrast to ordinary water which can only quench our thirst temporarily, and which can never provide eternal life. It’s useful to think of love as a stand-in for God here, because Clare is thinking about love as something enormous and immortal which fills the world, rather than as an emotion shared by particular people.
The third line of the second stanza can be read as an even more explicit Biblical allusion. The word “eve” was a conventional shortening of evening. However, the word also suggests the Biblical Eve. In the Christian creation story, God originally makes humans immortal. However, when Eve disobeys his instructions and tastes a fruit that gives knowledge of good and evil, God punishes her by declaring that she and her descendants will die. In the first stanza, Clare has already drawn an association between dew and death. Here, we can read “Eve’s dews” as the mortality of the ordinary world.
In this stanza, Clare casts love as an escape from the reality of a world that has fallen from grace. In sleep and dreams, love remains a source of happiness and delight, despite the grief of the waking world. However, we also get hints here that Clare isn’t entirely satisfied with this narrative. Though he describes dream love as living, at its heart, it's an illusion—after all, it only “seems” delightful.
We know that the illusion of love isn’t enough for Clare, because in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas he shifts gears to emphasize love’s presence in the material world. We can see the shift most starkly in the line, “’Tis seen in flowers, and in the even’s pearly dew.” Where before the dew symbolized the impermanence of the ordinary world, and hence its inferiority to love, here the dew matters because it is beautiful. By paying attention to that beauty, the speaker can actually see love itself. The rest of the third stanza lists other beautiful parts of the natural world that the speaker can see: the blue of the sky, the green of the earth, the flowers in springtime.
The fourth and fifth stanzas neatly compliment this focus on sight by shifting to sound, and stating that love can also be heard. By emphasizing the power of the senses to detect love, Clare not only suggests that love exists in the material world, but also emphasizes the relationship between love and the body. The dreamy, immortal love of the first two stanzas seems pretty distant from our solid, mortal, fleshy bodies. In contrast, his description of seeing and hearing as ways of engaging with love firmly situate the body as part of love, even at its most abstract.
In the article “John Clare and Ecological Love,” Seth Reno suggests that Clare’s work on love is inextricable from his emphasis on the beauty and value of nature. Clare’s writing about nature is characterized not only by deep knowledge of the natural world, but also by a repeated emphasis on his love for the non-human beings and things with whom he shared his life. Compared to many of Clare’s other poems, “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” is sparse on natural detail, with vague references to “flowers” and “dew” in place of the highly specific natural vocabulary we find in poems like “The Yellowhammer’s Nest” and “The Badger.” Yet, in a way, “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” gives us a key to understanding those other poems, because it teaches us how Clare saw love: as both something divine and immortal, and as something inextricably embedded in the physical world.
The first five stanzas of the poem, then, seem to move away from defining love as transcendent, or beyond the limitations of the world, instead depicting it as part of the world. The final stanza, however, repeats the first. Why does Clare undo his progress? Partially, the return to the beginning stresses that the poem has not solved the problem of love’s relation to the finite world. We are left to chew on the contradiction that love both lives beyond the tomb, and can be seen in the ephemerality of the dew. However, Clare also makes a few changes to the first stanza when he reiterates it at the end of the poem. First, he writes “Love lives beyond the tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew” rather than “Love lives beyond the tomb, the earth, which fades like dew.” The latter phrase presents earth and tomb as synonyms, both defined by mortality. However, the former phrase, used at the end of the poem, merely lists the different parts of the world, without emphasizing their mortality: we now know that’s not the whole picture. Conversely, in the final line of the poem, Clare changes “I love the fond, the faithful, and the true” to “I love the fond, the faithful, young and true.” The addition of the word “young” hints that mortality also haunts love. After all, the young eventually age. The transcendent optimism of love depends on those who are young enough to forget their own deaths.
