God in the Natural World
One of the most persistent themes in the poetry of John Clare is the presence of God in the natural world. In “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb,” this theme appears obliquely through the idea of love, which Clare uses in its most abstract sense, as a stand-in for God. The third, fourth, and fifth stanzas emphasize that God can be found in the natural world. The speaker sees love in flowers, the dew, the green parts of the year, and the blue of the sky, and hears it in spring breezes. Clare’s emphasis on the power of the senses to detect the presence of love/God in the world emphasizes the importance of careful observation. By paying attention, we can encounter God in the world that surrounds us, despite the existence of grief and mortality.
Love
“Love Lives Beyond the Tomb” mostly describes love in abstract terms. Rather than recounting a particular experience of falling in love, the poem presents love as something that suffuses the world. We see this especially in the third and fourth stanzas, where Clare describes love as part of the natural landscape, amidst things that cannot even feel love in the conventional sense. In these parts of the poem, love is adapting the Christian equation of God with love to treat love as a form of divinity. However, Clare is also interested in love in the more conventional sense. The closing lines of the first and last stanza declare, “I love the fond,/ the faithful, young and true.” The phrase celebrates the ideal traits of particular lovers, and suggests that in their honesty and loyalty, they embody love’s capacity to go beyond the limits of finite existence.
Mortality
Mortality is another central idea in “Love Lives Beyond the Tomb.” Clare immediately stresses its importance by referring to “the tomb” in the second line. This line equates the earth with the grave, emphasizing both that earth is where we bury people, and that earth itself is one vast tomb because everything on its surface eventually dies or disappears. At the opening of the poem, Clare firmly positions mortality as a bad thing, and juxtaposes it negatively with love’s persistence. However, as the poem goes on, Clare takes a more complex stance towards ephemerality. For example, dew, a symbol of mortality in the first and second stanzas, becomes something where love’s presence can be seen in the third stanza. Many of the other sources of love in the poem, from the flowers to “earth’s green hours,” to springtime and even young lovers, are similarly short-lived, even for things on this earth (Clare does not find love in stones in the sea). These references lead us to see the repeated phrase “love lives” in a new light. Rather than only seeing love as something that never dies, we recognize it as something that also emerges in things which live for a time before fading away.
