Page 104 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Unit 8: Love Lives beyond the Tomb by John Clare

I love the fond, Notes
The faithful, and the true
Love lives in sleep,
’Tis happiness of healthy dreams
Eve’s dews may weep,
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,
On angels’ wing
Bring love and music to the wind.
And where is voice,
So young, so beautiful and sweet
As nature’s choice,
Where Spring and lovers meet?

Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,
The faithful, young and true.

8.7 Reflections

John Clare begins this poem using enjambment, forcing the reader to stop and consider before
he qualifies his thoughts with ‘The tomb – the earth’. Thus, a sense of the endurance of love is
created; an emotion that the speaker suggests can defy even death. The tone then becomes more
wistful as the speaker says ‘I love the fond,/The faithful and the true.’
Stanza two develops the idea of love’s all-encompassing nature as we are told ‘Love lives in
sleep’ and is ‘The happiness of healthy dreams’. Clare now moves on to link his ideas about love
to nature and the landscape that surrounds him. The language becomes celebratory as Clare
suggests that love can be found in the beauty of nature, in ‘flowers’, ‘the even’s pearly dew’,
‘On earth’ and in the ‘eternal blue’ of the sky.
The burgeoning new life of spring is fused, in stanzas four and five, with lovers and the delights
of young love. Here Clare seems to move towards a celebration of young love that, like the
spring, offers so much possibility and promise. The poem concludes with an echo of the first
stanza but now the young have become the focus of the speaker’s attentions. As the speaker still
asserts that ‘Love lives beyond/The tomb, the earth, the flowers and dew’, there is a suggestion,
at the end of this poem, that perhaps it is embraced more fully by the young who believe
themselves to be ‘faithful … and true.’

Task Make notes on the poem and while writing consider the way Clare weaves his
love of the natural landscape into his feelings about human love and look carefully at the
conclusion in contrast to the opening of the poem.

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