First Love (John Clare poem) Literary Elements

The poem is written from a first-person limited perspective. The speaker is likely based on John Clare's own experience of falling in love with his childhood companion Mary Joyce.

The poem is written in 3 stanzas of 8 lines each, in an ababcdcd rhyme scheme. The meter is iambic tetrameter, or four pairs of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.

In line 3, Clare adopts the conventional simile of comparing a woman's appearance to a flower.
In line 15, Clare uses simile to compare the words spoken by his gaze to the chords that flow from an instrument. Just as it is an instrument's purpose to make music, so his eyes' function has become not to see, but to profess his love.
In lines 23-24, Clare uses metaphor to imagine himself as a "dwelling-place" and his heart as someone setting out from their home to live somewhere else.

Alliteration of /s/ in line 2: "so sudden and so sweet"
Alliteration of /b/ in line 16: "blood burnt"
Alliteration of /s/ in line 19: "seemed to hear my silent voice"
Alliteration of /s/ in line 21: "saw so sweet"

The speaker is using language to describe a moment when he lost his ability to speak. By definition, he cannot convey the fullness of his experience at the moment.

Love poetry

A place in the countryside surrounded by trees and bushes

Ecstatic, overwhelmed, disoriented

The protagonist is the speaker. There isn't an antagonist, because the poem's conflict is largely internal, and it's not clear what the speaker wants.

"First Love" lacks a conflict in a traditional sense. Many love poems depict a speaker in conflict with a beloved who does not fully share his feelings. However, in "First Love," the speaker's experience is so overwhelming that the beloved's attitude becomes impossible to discern. Instead, the major conflict is between ordinary reality and the ecstatic experience of falling in love.

The first lines of the final stanza bring the conflict between ordinary reality and the ecstasy of love to a head. In the strangeness of the speaker's feelings, ordinary love imagery like flowers and beds become bizarre mirrors of themselves; flowers appear in winter, and the bed feels cold as ice.

Many lines of the first stanza foreshadow the far stranger and more intense final stanza. The first line, "I ne'er was struck before that hour," parallels the speaker's reassertion of the novelty of his experience in line 21, "I never saw so sweet a face." His description of his love as "sweet" and his beloved's face as like a "sweet flower" in the first stanza parallels his description of her face as "sweet" in the final stanza. The cliché "stole my heart away" foreshadows the definitive and moving ending of the poem, "my heart has left its dwelling-place / And can return no more."

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The first stanza alludes to the conventions of love poetry, especially the use of floral imagery to describe women.

In line 15, Clare uses metonymy in allowing "string" to stand in for a whole instrument.

In line 6, Clare personifies the speaker's legs by describing them as "refusing" to walk away, as though they had desires of their own.
In the last two lines of the poem, Clare personifies the speaker's heart by describing the body as its "dwelling-place" and the heart as setting out for somewhere new, like a person leaving their home behind.

In line 8, the speaker feels as though he has turned to clay, or died and become part of the soil, even though he remains very much alive.

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