With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete
The beginning of “First Love” sets us up for a pretty ordinary love poem (an expectation the rest of the poem utterly upends). Clare uses two conventional examples of figurative speech in quick succession. First, he invokes a popular comparison between a woman’s face and a flower. The comparison was already a cliché in the sixteenth century! Then, he describes his beloved as having stolen his heart. We hardly notice that Clare is using metaphor and comparing the beloved to a thief because the figure has been so overused as to become merely a figure of speech. The rhyme between “sweet” and “complete” feels similarly predictable. “Complete” is unnecessary for the meaning of “and stole my heart away,” so that it feels inserted into the poem merely to satisfy the rhyme scheme. Clare’s repetition of “sweet” makes the rhyme stick out even more awkwardly. In great poetry, rhyme and meter usually feel natural. They fade into the background of the poem, making it sound more beautiful while allowing the reader to sink into the language without being made aware of the poet. Indeed, this is what Clare pulls off with the rest of “First Love.” The awkward beginning before the beautiful and unusual rest of the poem stresses the difficulty of translating the ecstatic experience of love into poetry. What was a radically transformative experience risks becoming tired, predictable, and conventional once it’s been put into words.
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday
One of the most effective aspects of “First Love” is Clare’s use of ordinary objects in rendering a radically different world. He could have placed his lovers in a fantasy setting, surrounded by strange and unusual structures and creatures. Or he might have suggested an especially magnificent setting, like a great cathedral or a dark and lovely wood. Instead, he refers to achingly normal “trees and bushes” and describes them in colloquial terms as “round the place.” We imagine a perfectly ordinary public square in a small country town. It is love and love alone that makes this everyday place suddenly extraordinary. In the objective world, nothing has changed. The sun has risen as it does on every other day. Yet for the speaker, suddenly it “seems” as though midnight has fallen at noon, as though something entirely unprecedented has occurred.
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.
The string of figurative language here makes a particularly compelling comparison with the conventional figures of speech Clare employs at the beginning of the poem. As discussed in the first quote in this section, the first metaphor in the poem is “stole my heart away.” Objectively, its a strange image, but we all know the phrase so well that it feels perfectly ordinary. We lose the sense of bodily transformation, immediately recognizing it as merely a figure of speech. Here, Clare returns to the heart in a much more striking context. He describes it surrounded by burning blood, a resolutely bodily image that emphasizes the physical pain of love. The preceding line features another bizarre description of the body, as the speaker describes words springing from his eyes. In contrast to the conventional figures of speech at the beginning of the poem, which allow the speaker and the reader to forget the reality of the body, here the speaker seems highly conscious of his own organs. He pays attention to the working of his eyes and the burning of his heart in his chest. As readers, we might briefly experience this same heightened awareness. The poem, like love, has the power to make the ordinary experience of embodiment suddenly feel bizarre and uncomfortable.
