Kennie Ting remaps John Clare's An Invite to Eternity

Clare's poem An Invite to Eternity sets itself up as an extremely readerly poem. Even though Clare is the author of the poem, true authority with regards to the meaning and overall tone of the poem lies in the hands of the reader by virtue of the poem's lack of punctuation, and its use of obscure imagery. By withholding the use of the question mark in his poem, Clare leaves the responsibility of structuring and emoting the text to the reader, allowing for a variety of different ways in which the poem can be read orally and logically. Similarly, Clare's ambiguous syntax and his often daring superposition of seemingly unrelated images leaves the question of interpretation entirely in the reader's hands. In both cases, reader-engagement is brought about by the reader's pursuit of a question or a question mark, suggesting that though physically absent in the text, the question mark is the symbol of reader-poem intimacy and the main driving force behind the poem's predisposition to active readership.

The most important reason for the poem's readerly quality is its lack of punctuation or more specifically, its lack of a question mark. The nature of Clare's language suggests that his poem is a series of questions posed to the ìsweet maidî he desires (2). However, the absence of a question mark reduces the certainty of this conclusion and renders both the nature and the tone of the poem ambiguous. In the first two lines of the poem, Clare implores his surrogate reader thus:

Since there is no question mark in the extract, it is impossible for the reader to make any conclusion as to the nature of the sentence and the tone with which it should be read. The lines are, in consequence, flat and lifeless and they seem to implore the reader to flesh them out; to punctuate them as he will and thus add depth and emotion to them. The reader finds himself having to make decisions regarding how and when to pause within the lines and how to best express the questioning tone of the lines. In the realm of orality, the possibilities of expression are endless. Depending on how the reader enunciates, the tone of the lines could be wistfully imploring, as in "Wilt thou... go with me... sweet maid?" (the ellipses added to represent a hesitant pause); sexually suggestive, as in "Wilt thou go with me sweet maid...?" (the ellipses representing a silence pregnant with desire); or aggressively interrogative --"Wilt thou go with me sweet maid?!" with an added exclamation point. The lack of punctuation predisposes the poem towards orality, leaving the construction of tone and emotions entirely to the reader such that whether the poem reads like psychopath's suicide note or an intense love poem is up to the reader's discretion.

A more structural consequence of the missing question mark is that the poem physically resembles a collection of sentence fragments, and the responsibility for joining these fragments to form complete and logical sentences lies heavily on the reader. Unfortunately, deciding where one sentence ends and another begins in the poem is often difficult and frustrating. Take this extract, for example:

The lack of a question mark in the text as a form of closure leaves the question of organization entirely open-ended. The reader is given the license either to decide where to place the ill-fated question mark, or to ignore completely the logical flow of the narrative and take each line as an unfinished sentence. Naturally, the aim of the reader in reading the poem is to attempt to extract meaning out of it, and he would thus choose to organize the extract accordingly in order to collect the fragments into a full sentence. The process is complicated: to decide where to put the question mark in the extract above and thus mark off one sentence from another, the reader first has to continue reading the rest of the stanza.

In the extract above, it is difficult to decide whether line 4 begins a new sentence which ends with line 8 or whether lines 4 to 7 are part of the previous sentence beginning line 2, and line 8 begins a new sentence. Only after reading the first line of the next stanza would the reader decide that the latter option is (possibly) more correct. The reader would then read on contentedly only to find that by the middle of the next stanza, he faces the same dilemma again, but with different line numbers. The process continues to the end of the poem. The lack of a question mark results in a continual crisis of structural interpretation which might lead to anxiety and frustration on the part of the reader, but more importantly, ensures that the reader comes closer to fully appreciating the poem.

The contents of the poem are similarly frustrating in their ambiguity. Clare's tendency to join together contrary concepts or objects renders his poem ambiguous and even obscure in meaning. Take for example, these two lines, continued from the above extract:

The obscurity of Clare's imagery is evident. How do "stones ... turn to flooding streams" or "plains ... rise like ocean waves"? What exactly does he mean? Clare welds together almost violently these conflicting images of natural phenomena to describe an event that is impossible in real life. However, within this practical impossibility of actually reproducing each of these phenomena lies a wealth of possible interpretations. Depending on the reader, the image of ìstones turning to flooding streamsî in the above extract could represent an earthquake, a giant tsunami or simply a general description of the Apocalypse. This wealth of interpretation within ambiguity is similarly demonstrated in stanza IV:

What does he refer to by saying the "past, and the present all as one"? Why is the ìpresent mixed with reasons gone? Is it the present that is "gone" or the "reasons" that are gone? Once again, questions outnumber conclusions and the reader finds himself trying to impose his own understanding of the poem onto the poem itself. Clare's images engage the reader into an active construction of meaning. They are open-ended metaphors that may perhaps be likened to question marks, demanding from the reader a clarification of their signification.

Clare's choice of sentence structure and syntax is similarly problematic and thus conducive to reader engagement. Consider these lines from stanza III:

Besides being a very long sentence that continues beyond this extract, this stanza is also the most generously punctuated stanza in the poem. The second observation is all the more intriguing in that the commas are absolutely superfluous and complicate rather than simplify the sentence structure. Instead of distinguishing would-be subordinate clauses like "at once to be, and not to be" from the main proposition "Say maiden wilt thou ... or name," the commas are placed where they are not needed. For example, in "without this life, or home, or name" the word "or" already fulfils the comma's function and any other punctuation is redundant. The point to be made in this paragraph is that Clare's sentence structure becomes another vantage point from which to analyze or speculate about the poem. One cannot but wonder why Clare decides to superfluously punctuate this stanza of his poem where the rest remain barren. Similarly, one cannot resist speculating about why Clare decides to write such a long and convoluted sentence (if it is indeed intended to be one sentence) that extends through the entire stanza.

More importantly, one would analyze the effect of this choice of punctuation and sentence structure on the meaning of the poem. Perhaps Clare wishes to emphasize by punctuating the stanza, that the real world with its "[homes, lives and names]" is too full of restrictive governing rules. Perhaps the convoluted nature of the sentence is meant to simulate a winding and looping path down which Clare leads his fictional "sweet maid" (2). Grammar itself becomes another medium by which the reader offers an interpretation of the poem's meaning. It is another question mark--an ambiguity--that the poem throws towards the reader hoping for a solution.

Consolidating all the ways in which An Invite provokes readerly participation in the construction of meaning and tone, it is clear that the poem is an extremely readerly text. Even though the basic scenario of the poem is an invitation, the narrator relinquishes his position of authority as host by offering minimal guidelines as to how to read his poem. He allows the reader to rend apart and lay waste to his words in order to form a renegade version of what the poem might have meant to him. In the absence of any authorial prodding, the main guiding principle in the poem is the question mark both as a form of punctuation and as a rhetorical signifier representing the meaning of an image or a choice of structuring sentences in the text.

This question mark, of course does not ever surface in the text, but like the dangling carrot in front of a mule, it leads the reader into closer analyzing and thus becoming more intimate with the text. It is the question mark's physical elusiveness (the lack of the question mark as a form of punctuation) that spurs the reader on to fit his own intonations and emotions to the text. Similarly, it is the rhetorical and unanswerable question mark in the question "What does this mean?" (inspired by Clare's complicated and ambiguous imagery and sentence structure) that provokes the reader into providing an interpretation of the poem's meaning. The question mark, therefore, symbolizes the intimacy of the reader-poem relationship and is the motivating agent that persistently urges the reader ever forward into a closer analysis of the text.

The last two lines of the poem describe vividly the function of the question mark in the poem--to "wed" the reader to the poem. Like the abstract yet seemingly desirable concept of "eternity" that Clare tempts his maiden with, the elusive question mark hangs ostentatiously in the distance to remind the reader of the constant potential for greater intimacy between poem and reader.

An Invite to Eternity is indeed aptly titled. Like a big question mark, the poem sets itself up to invite the reader to analyze it and endow it with both meaning and emotional depth. The main implication of the text being of a readerly nature is that there is no absolute objective reading of it but rather, an endless variety of different and subjective interpretations. The varied interpretations of the poem, as well as the text of the poem itself, would make up the "eternity" of the poem, an "eternity" that though difficult to comprehend at a fictive or metafictive level, might perhaps be easily assimilated to hypertext.