First Love

In the second stanza, the imagery is both strange and grounded in the speaker’s reality. Rather than the “sweet flower” he imagines his beloved’s face to be, he looks out at the far less romantic “trees and bushes” that surround him where he stands. Yet love has made this ordinary world strange. Though it is the middle of the day, his vision has gone so dark that it seems like midnight. The speaker’s feelings thus inhibit his ability to orient himself in the world. As readers, we also feel disoriented. Rather than the conventional love poem we expected, we find ourselves inhabiting an almost religious experience, where the speaker seems to be losing his grip on ordinary reality.

The change soon extends to the speaker’s own body, which becomes a different kind of object through the overwhelming influence of his sudden love. His eyes, having ceased to see, become instead instruments for speech. In the most literal sense, the speaker is describing his silent stare; unable to say a word, his desperate gaze becomes his only way of expressing his feelings. Yet Clare’s use of figurative language emphasizes the strangeness of this experience, rather than the romance.

He writes that words precede from the speaker’s eyes “as chords do from the string.” An instrument’s purpose is to play music; chords spring naturally from its strings. Here, the simile suggests that it has become equally natural for the speaker’s eyes to speak, rather than see. The comparison suggests that love has permanently changed his body, transformed even the functions of its organs to accord with love’s purposes.

The final line of the second stanza builds on this theme. The speaker says, “and blood burnt round my heart.” The word heart recalls the first stanza, where he wrote that his beloved “stole my heart away complete.” Yet the organ fulfills very different roles in the two lines. In the first stanza, the heart was merely an abstract symbol of love. A heart surrounded by burning blood is an entirely different image. Though still a symbol of love, it is also explicitly part of the speaker’s physical body, a bloody, beating organ. There’s almost a hint of body horror here—love has made the speaker’s own body new and strange.