John Clare

Love Lives Beyond the Tomb

Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew-
I love the fond,
The faithful, and the true.

Beyond vs. lies in

Clare shifts from 'beyond' (transcendent) to 'lies in' (immanent). Love both outlasts death and inhabits ordinary life—he's arguing both directions at once.

Love lies in sleep,
The happiness of healthy dreams,
Eve's dews may weep,

Eve's dews may weep

Biblical Eve, not evening. Clare personifies the first woman as mourning—original sin and sorrow enter the poem, but love persists 'delightful' anyway.

But love delightful seems.
'Tis seen in flowers,
And in the even's pearly dew
On earth's green hours,
And in the heaven's eternal blue.
'Tis heard in spring
When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,

Angels wing

Missing apostrophe—'angels' not 'angel's.' Spring arrives on multiple wings, a collective angelic force. Clare often drops punctuation for speed.

On angels wing
Bring love and music to the wind.
And where is voice
So young, so beautiful, so sweet
As nature's choice,

Nature's choice

Unusual phrasing—nature actively chooses this voice. Not 'nature's voice' but her deliberate selection of the meeting place between spring and lovers.

Where spring and lovers meet?
Love lies beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,

Young added

Final stanza adds 'young' to the list of love's qualities. The poem itself has aged from start to finish—love gains youth while everything else fades.

The faithful, young, and true.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Clare's Asylum Theology

CONTEXT Clare wrote this in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he spent his final 23 years (1841-1864). He'd lost contact with his first love Mary Joyce, believed his wife Patty was an imposter, and experienced severe delusions. This poem reads like a man constructing a cosmology where love can't be taken from him.

The structure is relentlessly circular—'Love lives beyond / The tomb' opens the poem, 'Love lies beyond / The tomb' closes it. Between these bookends, Clare catalogs where love exists: sleep, flowers, dew, spring, wind, 'where spring and lovers meet.' He's not describing love metaphorically; he's mapping its literal locations in the universe. For someone whose grip on reality was slipping, this reads like an inventory of safe places.

Notice the faithful appearing twice (stanzas 1 and 6). In asylum records, Clare remained obsessed with fidelity—his own, Mary's, Patty's. The word anchors both the poem's beginning and end, suggesting faithfulness is what makes love outlast death. The poem argues that constancy, not intensity, grants immortality.

Dew as Connective Tissue

Dew appears four times in 24 lines, doing different work each time. First: 'earth, which fades like dew'—transience. Second: 'Eve's dews may weep'—sorrow. Third: 'the even's pearly dew'—beauty. Fourth: 'the flowers, and dew' (final stanza)—just another item in the catalog of things love transcends.

Clare uses dew to connect earth and heaven. It's 'pearly' (valuable, heaven-associated) but appears 'On earth's green hours'—literally the moisture that links soil to sky each morning. For a poet known for precise natural observation, this isn't decorative. Dew is the physical evidence that heaven touches earth daily.

The 'even's pearly dew' (evening's dew) creates a problem: dew forms at dawn, not dusk. Either Clare misremembers basic nature—unlikely for him—or 'even' means 'level/smooth' (archaic usage). The dew is evenly distributed, pearls scattered democratically. Love, like dew, goes everywhere impartially.