Songs Eternity

As its title appears to suggest, Clare’s Song Eternity deals with the eternal elements of nature. Although “Be they high or lowly bred / They die” ends the first stanza with the idea that nothing lasts forever, the ending of the second stanza directly contrasts this with “Songs awakened with the spheres / Alive” because these songs have existed for “six thousand years” since the date of creation as calculated from the Bible. This particularly applies to material things such as “Crowds and citys” or “Books are writ and books are read” that will “pass away” and the fact “They die” is again given a line to itself at the end of a stanza emphasises a kind of forlorn hopelessness in this, it is unavoidable. However, natural things such as “Melodys of earth and sky”, even those “sung to adams ears” or “Noahs ark” that that still exist despite being created thousands of years ago, “Songs like the grass are evergreen”. There are alternate interpretations of this simile, it could simply mean that songs always remain green, or, with the extra reference to the grass, that songs remain green only if they are like grass, in other words, if they are natural. Songs and nature are joined together and they are eternal.

The whole structure of the poem supports this idea of eternity. There is a notable lack of punctuation, with the enjambment joining each line together with no breaks: if reading the poem, it would be difficult to know where to draw breath as it flows in one continuous line. Use of repetition also helps emphasise an eternal nature to the poem or song, “Come and see” in the first, second and fifth stanzas, “What are they” in the third and just the constant rhyme of “ee” sounds echo each other and give the impression of a song that never quite fades, but instead builds on itself. In this way, the poem becomes more like a song and considering its earlier statement that books will die, a song made for singing out loud rather than trapping in a book has more chance of eternal survival by being closer to nature.