Summary
The first stanza of “First Love” describes the initial encounter between the speaker and the woman he falls in love with. His love arrives “sudden” and “sweet” in response to the beauty of her face. He feels the blood drain out of his face, and he feels paralyzed by intense emotion, unable to move or look away when she sees him staring. His emotion is so intense that he feels barely alive.
In the next stanza, things get stranger. The blood returns back to his face as he blushes, and he goes blind, so that the world looks dark as midnight although it is the middle of the day. Unable to see anything, he focuses instead on the words of love and longing that fill his mind, and believes expressing these thoughts is his only purpose. The experience is painful: his heart feels as though it is burning.
The final stanza begins with even more surreal imagery. The speaker sees flowers blooming in winter and an ice cold bed for making love. He thinks that his beloved hears the silent voice of his heart, yet he also suspects she does not recognize “love’s appeals.” The final lines return to the beginning of the poem. Still, the speaker feels he has never seen as beautiful a face as that of this woman, and he concludes that he has truly lost his heart to her forever.
Analysis
In “First Love,” John Clare begins from the premise of a conventional love poem, but then subverts the reader’s expectations by presenting love as disorienting and strange, rather than sweet and sentimental.
The first four lines are extremely simple, and closely mimic the norms of sentimental love poetry. The imagery is sparse, generic, and predictable. The speaker compares his beloved to a “sweet flower,” recalling literary associations between springtime and romance that had been established for centuries. Rather than responding to any particular feature of his beloved, the speaker seems to be merely adopting pre-established similes to situate her as an archetypal love object in a typical love poem.
Clare suggests that he is doing something different by going a little overboard. Before comparing the beloved to a sweet flower, he describes the speaker’s feelings of love as “sweet.” The repetition of the word twice in the space of two lines, in two distinct contexts, makes it feel less meaningful, like when you repeat a word to yourself so many times that it starts to sound like noise. Then, in line four, he rhymes “sweet” with “complete,” further playing up the feeling of redundancy. In the same line the speaker professes that she “stole my heart away,” a cliché that once again makes this all feel a little too predictable.
Had Clare stopped there, we might conclude that this was just a boring poem. However, in the next line, everything changes, and love becomes a far stranger affair. It's this context that makes it more convincing to read the exaggerated redundancy of the first four lines as intentional, rather than merely a symptom of a lack of creativity.
Compare, for example, the two similes, “her face it bloomed like a sweet flower” and “my face turned pale as deadly pale.” The first is utterly predictable, both in its content (a woman compared to a beautiful flower, love associated with springtime imagery), and in its form (a straightforward comparison between a thing the speaker sees and a poetic image). Conversely, the second simile subverts the expectations of both content and form. Instead of blushing, the blood drains from the speaker’s face, a far more serious response that seems closer to death than love. Furthermore, the intensity of his experience breaks the form of the simile. Rather than comparing one thing to another, Clare writes “pale as deadly pale,” comparing the “real thing” only to itself. Suddenly, the norms of poetic language aren’t enough to express the intensity of the speaker’s emotional experience. There’s no escaping to the comfortable realm of simile, and the speaker remains trapped in his own overwhelming reality.
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.
The vast difference between ordinary life and the disorienting experience of falling in love comes to a head in the first two lines of the final stanza. The speaker asks, “Are flowers the winter’s choice? / Is love’s bed always snow?,” again calling back to the first stanza while emphasizing that love has not been at all what he expected. Instead of the pretty springtime, his love is like a winter landscape: vast, cold, deadly, otherworldly. In the shadow of the speaker’s love, flowers have become winter creatures, and what should be a warm bed shared with a lover is instead icy and painful as lying in snow.
Only when the speaker has established the absolute difference between his real feelings and the overused conventions of the first stanza does the poem finally turn back to the beloved. Like flowers in winter, midnight at noonday, and an ice cold bed, her feelings are a paradox. She seems to hear the “silent voice” of the speaker’s love, or the devotion professed by his gaze. Yet she also does not know “love’s appeals”—perhaps she is so innocent that she is entirely unacquainted with the desires associated with love, or perhaps she merely cannot interpret what the speaker wants from his gaze alone. She thus both hears and does not hear, and we are left unsure of how much she understands.
In the end, it doesn't really seem to matter. After all, the speaker’s radical transformation was inevitable from the moment he first glimpsed his beloved. The last four lines of the poem parallel the first four, but now they feel fresh and real, rather than generic and sentimental. The speaker uses the word “sweet” only once. Rather than comparing his beloved’s face to a flower, now it is the face itself that seems sweet to him. Without the predictable simile, the adjective is more abstract, and hence more unexpected. Similarly, he returns to the cliché, “stole my heart away,” but writes instead, “my heart has left its dwelling-place,” a simple yet original way of expressing the same sentiment. The new phrase also makes the change appear more permanent. A stolen heart might be returned or taken back, but the heart that leaves its dwelling-place seems to have done so out of its own initiative. Like a man who abandons his home, the speaker’s heart does not plan to return.
