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

The speaker addresses a “maiden” with a wooing question that is also an invitation into annihilation: a “strange death of life-to-be,” where identity (“home or name”) is surrendered. The paradoxes—“live in death,” “at once to be and not to be”—suggest a gothic or visionary register in which love, despair, and metaphysical doubt converge. Read as Clarean, it can be taken as an extreme expression of dislocation: the longing to escape social and personal constraints by entering a state beyond ordinary life, yet still “be the same.” The lines dramatize the temptation of oblivion as a kind of continuity, a refusal of the future (“life-to-be”) and of fixed selfhood.