Bodily Transformation
We often use body-based metaphors to speak about love. From “butterflies in your stomach” to “heartbreak,” if taken literally they would often describe a pretty horrific sensation. However, many of these metaphors are so overused that the innate strangeness of the imagery they describe is lost to us—no one hears “butterflies in your stomach” and thinks of buzzing insects filling their gut. In “First Love,” John Clare uses fresh language to bring that strangeness back to the fore. Beginning with a cliché metaphor, “stole my heart away,” he quickly moves on to much more literal imagery. His face goes pale, his legs cease to work, and he feels as though his body has turned to clay, or become like what it will be in death. The preoccupation with the body heightens in the next stanza. He describes blushing more graphically, as blood rushing to his face and taking his eyesight away. Because the blush affects his ability to see, we know he’s not just speaking figuratively—love is really transforming the speaker’s living, breathing body.
Perhaps the strangest image in the poem comes at the end of the second stanza, when the speaker states that words leap from his unseeing eyes. He writes that “they [his eyes] speak as chords do from the string.” The simile implies that just as the purpose of a musical instrument is to make music, so the purpose of his eyes is to speak—yet we know that isn’t their purpose, or at least, has not been their purpose until the moment the speaker fell in love. The next line compounds the sense of body horror, as Clare writes that “blood burnt round my heart.” Far from the comforting, familiar territory of stolen hearts, this image is insistently bodily—we don’t imagine a round valentine’s heart, but a muscle surrounded by blood and bone. For the reader, all this visceral imagery makes the poem hit closer to home, much as body horror in a horror movie might send a shiver down your spine. Even if we’ve read hundreds of love poems, Clare’s unusual imagery gives the poem the impact of a first time for the reader as well as the speaker.
The Speaking Gaze
“First Love” features a speaker who has been temporarily struck dumb. The poem we read is in the past tense; the speaker describes something that happened to him in the past. In the moment when he actually sees his beloved, he is silent. While Clare emphasizes that the speaker loses his ability to walk and see in the presence of his beloved, he never describes the moment when the speaker becomes speechless. Yet by the third stanza, we hear that his beloved seems to hear his “silent voice” and see that the speaker was no more able to put his feelings into words than he was capable of walking up to his beloved and embracing her. In the place of language, the speaker has only his gaze. As we discuss in the previous theme, love transforms his eyes from instruments for seeing into instruments for speaking. The image is truly bizarre, but the experience it describes might be more familiar than it seems at first glance; think about when you’ve had a crush, and suddenly become more preoccupied with whether your stares give your interest away, and whether your crush is looking back, than with what you actually see. For Clare’s speaker, that play of gazes becomes the only way of communicating. In some ways, it seems almost better than regular words—the words that spring from his eyes are as natural as notes from an instrument; his eyes cannot stutter or hesitate, and thought cannot interfere and introduce the possibility of dishonesty or manipulation. Yet they also make misunderstanding almost inevitable, as we see in the final stanza. The speaker at once feels that his beloved hears him, and does not know the meaning of his gaze. In that sense, the speaking gaze is another of the many paradoxes the poem associates with falling in love.
Love as Radical Break with the Normal
Perhaps the most important theme in “First Love” is the idea that love is a radical break with normal life. By radical here we mean total or complete—like the difference between life and death. Many aspects of the poem work to create this effect. The images of bodily transformation are probably the most pronounced. The paradoxes at the beginning of the third stanza are another way Clare reinforces the sense of love as a totally different world; suddenly, flowers grow in winter, and beds are ice cold. The first line immediately emphasizes that the love the speaker feels is different from anything he’s ever felt. A love “so sudden and so sweet” has “ne’er” before affected him. He returns to the theme at the end of the final stanza, as he again stresses that he “never saw so sweet a face” as that of his beloved. We get a sense of a life divided in half. There was the time before he saw her, one long undifferentiated period of normalcy and mild loves, and the person he is now that his “heart has left its dwelling-place” forever, remaking his body and assigning strange new rules to the world.
