Explore the poem

Clare’s haunting poem about suddenly and dramatically falling in love captures not only the pleasure but also the pain of this experience. The intensely personal nature of this cry from the heart is emphasised by the use of “I” as the first word of the poem. The speaker is grappling with emotions that are deeply disorientating. Midday looks like midnight and he is almost physically disabled by the sight of the face of the woman he loves.

Notice how references to sight run through the poem and how Clare places the word “heart” in each stanza. His heart has been stolen, blood burns around it and this heart can never return to its home. The language and imagery clearly suggest an unrequited love and a world turned upside down. Flowers should not bloom in winter and “love’s bed” should be warm and deeply comforting not cold as “snow”. This contrasts tellingly with the first verse where we might think we are encountering a pretty, conventional love poem with the pleasing sibilance of “…love so sudden and so sweet” and a face likened to a “sweet flower”. In the end though Clare’s encounter with “love” seems to have left him deeply disturbed and bewildered.

About John Clare

John Clare was a farm labourer who was largely self-educated. He was deeply affected by the Enclosure Act of 1801, when common land was fenced off, halting farming by the general populace, and wrote movingly about the uprooting of trees and hedges and the loss of common land, which changed a centuries-old way of life.

In 1820, Clare’s first collection of poems was published. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery proved extremely popular, and Clare was briefly adopted by fashionable London society. However, subsequent volumes were not successful, as fashions changed and the novelty of reading the work of a ‘peasant poet’ wore off. Clare became increasingly delusional, distressed by the failure of his literary ambitions and the devastation caused by enclosure.

He spent the last twenty­‑three years of his life in the Northampton county asylum, where he produced some remarkable, tormented visionary poems, such as ‘I Am’.