The speaker asks a woman he loves to accompany him into a strange, liminal state — a kind of living death where light, time, and identity dissolve. The landscape he describes is deeply unsettling: paths go nowhere, plains rise like waves, and the familiar world slips away into “sad non-identity.” His repeated question, “wilt thou go with me,” feels both tender and desperate. He is inviting her to lose everything, even the memory of being known by parents and sisters, to exist in a blur between being and nothingness. The mood is haunting and intimate, full of longing for a union that can only happen beyond ordinary life. There’s a dark romance in the final lines, where they become “wed to one eternity,” but it’s a wedding stripped of faces, names, and any anchor of self. It’s a love poem edged with terror and surrender, a whispered plea to vanish together.
Invitation to Eternity — Summary
Say, wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me Through the valley-depths of shade, Of bright and dark obscurity; Where the path has lost its way, Where the sun forgets the day, Where there's nor light nor life to see, Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?
Where stones will turn to flooding streams, Where plains will rise like ocean's waves, Where life will fade like visioned dreams And darkness darken into caves, Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me Through this sad non-identity Where parents live and are forgot, And sisters live and know us not?
Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be, To live in death and be the same, Without this life or home or name, At once to be and not to be-- That was and is not--yet to see Things pass like shadows, and the sky Above, below, around us lie?
The land of shadows wilt thou trace, Nor look nor know each other's face; The present marred with reason gone, And past and present both as one? Say, maiden, can thy life be led To join the living and the dead? Then trace thy footsteps on with me: We are wed to one eternity.