“Words From My Eyes Did Start”: John Clare’s ‘First Love’
Sigi Jöttkandt
Ghent University
Isn’t there something a little tautologous about the idea of “first love”, at least in John Clare’s poem of this title? For Clare, first love is quite literally the first time, the first strike of the clock that begins counting out his hours to death. In what sense, then, can first love be “first,” if it is first love itself that puts him into time, and begins the counting procedure? Here I will try to show how, for Clare, first love is not so much a tautology as a hysteron proteron, the trope that describes the disorder of time: what should be first comes last.
‘First Love’
I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale.
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start --
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.
Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
Not love’s appeals to know.
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.
Let us begin by noting the seemingly simple pattern of internal and external movement traced out by the poem: something comes at the speaker from the outside – the face of the beloved – whose effect is to root him to the spot. Yet this physical paralysis nevertheless generates a rush of internal movement that seeks some form of external expression, accomplished through a peculiar and paradoxical form of communication – “words from my eyes did start.” Following this is a more general philosophical reflection on love, with its own very peculiar question (“are flowers the winter’s choice?”), and the poem ends by returning to an image of internal movement, of the speaker’s exiled and wandering heart.
Thus stated, the poem describes what I propose to call the four “phases” of first love: the encounter, emotional and physical collapse, testimony and work (although time constraints mean that I will not be able to address the final phase, work, in this talk).
I will take each of these phases individually.
1. The encounter.
Coming upon the speaker without warning, love’s strike tolls the speaker’s first hour, smiting his “I” into existence: “I ne’er was struck before that hour.” It is the sight of the beloved’s face, compared to a flower, that is the cause of this entry into time. This seems fitting, since flowers have long carried not only love’s metaphoric weight but also the metaphoric weight of time to the extent that they are fundamentally heliotropic: the flower’s traditional metaphorical associations all orbit the sun which, in addition to its life-giving, regenerative properties, is also the principal means by which we measure time.
Hence, as it begins the process of counting out of the hours of the speaker’s remaining life, the encounter with first love could be said to begin the subject’s clock, to start the hands of time turning. As the first “turn,” it is therefore also the first trope, organizing the previously undifferentiated multitude of sense impressions into a series of oppositional distinctions. To the same extent, then, that the sun is life-giving, it also forewarns the speaker of his death, reflected in his suddenly “deadly pale” face and immobile state. To be alive, to be able to say “I AM,” as Clare famously does in the title of one of his most anthologized poems, is also, simultaneously, to reflect on one’s own potential for non-being. These temporally-introduced distinctions – played out in the poem as the oppositions between night and day, past and future, death and life – all become available only because first love has sounded the primary toll of the bell against which all future clock strikes can be counted.
And yet, as I suggested, there is a potential problem with this. In what sense can “first love” be “first” if first love inaugurates time? How can we count the first love, in other words, if it is precisely first love that opens up the possibility of counting? The mathematical concept behind this, as J. Hillis Miller has explored at length, is of course the need for a zero, for a “nothing” that can be “counted” as one.[1] But for Clare, it really does seem as though it is first love that primordially brings the “I” or One of the self into being i.e. there is no zero or “empty set” prior to first love that can serve as the basis for the count. To put this into Freudian terms, for Clare there seems to be no original narcissistic ego upon which all subsequent future loves can be built. Rather, first love is what produces that self.
2. Collapse
The second stanza then describes the physical effects of love’s strike and what is curious about this “phase” is the way it seems to stop time again. If the tolling of first love brought the subject’s “I” into being, that is, into time, its immediate effect is to make it impossible to tell the time, to distinguish night from day (and, by implication, life from death):
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
Two possibilities present themselves here. One is simply that the sight of the beloved’s face is like looking at the sun – everything goes black, you feel your blood rushing to the face, you feel like you’re going to faint etc. In this case, first love is conceived as a blinding force that entirely erases the subject’s “I” which love, itself, has brought into being. The lover merges with his beloved. One look at her face and he is fully “hers,” wiped out by her brilliant light.
There is another suggestion, however, that I would like to take up which is that the speaker himself is the very “sun” that was the cause of his (self-)birth. This reading takes its cue from the word clay in the previous stanza. If the flowering of the beloved’s face at first supports the idea of love’s sunrise, a life-giving event that gives birth to the speaker, its effect, as Justin Clemens originally pointed out to me, is to reduce the speaker to the condition of bare life, to the “clay” of which mankind first was made. This is, then, a strangely pre-mortal life, a pure fundament or life-principle out of which flowers such as his beloved’s face emerge, whose additional implication, then, is that the speaker is somehow the “source” or origin of that beloved.
This would shift the original position of the speaker in relation to his beloved’s face/flower/sun. It is not the blinding effect of looking at the metaphorical sun of his beloved’s face that has caused everything to go black for the speaker, as he sinks into a kind of love swoon. Rather, everything is dark because the sun itself has been blocked out. What has blocked the sight of the sun? The first, paradoxical, answer would be that the “sun” itself (i.e. the beloved’s face as a flower) has blocked sight of the sun – resulting in what would be the logically impossible but not poetically inconceivable eclipse of the sun by itself (i.e. by a metaphor for itself, the flower). Yet if we take this image further, recalling the association of the speaker with the earth as clay, the suggestion would seem to be stranger: insofar as the earth is the “ground” and source of the flower/sun (which is blocking the real sun), it is the speaker/earth that seems to be the cause of the sun’s sudden disappearance. This would give us the image of the sun’s eclipse not by itself but by the earth. In a sudden rotation, it is the earth that blocks the sight of the sun to itself: it is the earth’s own self-eclipse. I can no longer see the sun because I am myself standing in its way, I am in my own shadow.
3. Testimony
The next phase is what I called testimony and it is striking to note the parallels between the simple narrative the poem has told so far and the structure of a traumatic event and its aftermath as described by Dori Laub: the speaker is suddenly struck by something that (at least initially) seems to come from the outside. Its effect is to momentarily paralyze him: he feels helpless, loses his usual sense of space and time and can only testify to this experience in an anomalous yet still expressive form of communication, found in that most peculiar line at the very center or “navel” of the poem, “Words from my eyes did start.”
As I indicated in my description of the poem’s internal/external dialectic, this paradoxical communication begins the movement of re-externalization, and it is this movement that theorists of trauma regard as so vital to the healing process. In Clare’s case, such re-externalization takes form in the third stanza’s reflection and generalization about love. So let us look more closely at the “testimony” represented in this line. In the “words” that spring from the speaker’s eyes, the poet finds himself testifying to an experience that is unable to find expression through the ordinary channels of discourse. These silent “words” are thus a kind of inverted counterpart of the speechless voice released through the wound that Cathy Caruth employs so effectively as a figure for the “unclaimed” experience that is trauma. Clare’s speaker’s silent “words” by-pass vocalized speech, seemingly springing of their own accord from his eyes. The question one must ask, then, is what occurred in the previous line to cause this bizarre outburst?
Up until now, the speaker has been speaking of his experience as though he were observing himself from the outside, culminating in the supremely alienating experience of being divided in two where his self blocks out his sight of the sun. We hear how his face has turned pale, although it remains unclear to me how he knows this since I’m not sure that paleness is strictly a feeling one can have of one’s body. Are we not more often told that we look pale, which we then confirm by looking in a mirror? The “refusal” of the speaker’s legs similarly invokes the idea of an outside perspective to the extent that they seem to possess a life and will of their own. What I am trying to draw your attention to, in other words, is a certain “objectivity” in the speaker’s recounting of the events following the strike of first love. In this context, a line from the second stanza seems particularly arresting insofar as it contains a direct statement of experience: “I could not see a single thing.” If until now, the speaker has been trying to put his account into a more or less organized and chronological form, heavily inflected at the rhetorical level by comparisons that serve to draw the speaker’s and reader’s attention outward and away from the self, this sudden bald statement of fact enters the poem almost as a cry and produces a peculiarly jarring effect. And the immediate result of this is a shift in the poem’s rhetorical gear. From actively seeking similes in the previous stanza (“like a sweet flower”, “pale as deadly pale”, “my life and all seemed turned to clay”), the poem moves into fully metaphorical mode: “Words from my eyes did start.” Although in the subsequent line, we discover another simile, “they spoke as chords do from the string,” this, too, is arguably invested in a metaphorically-driven economy where musical harmonies also “speak,” while the final line of the stanza returns us into triumphant metaphorical mode with the image of blood “burning” round the speaker’s heart.
Several things are important to note here. As if to confirm De Man’s assertion that the aesthetic acts as the “guardian” of reason,[2] the first is the way that metaphor seems to comes to the “rescue,” as it were, of the speaker at what I am hearing as a moment of crisis in his account. The metaphor effectively transforms a literal blindness into a different form of (in-)sight: the eyes that could not see suddenly and miraculously “speak” and are understood.[3] Second, this advent of a metaphorical frame not only enables the speaker to express himself within the diegetic space of the event that he is recounting (i.e. telling of how, despite his paralysis, he nevertheless could express his feeling of love to his beloved). It also begins the process that Laub has identified as central to the therapeutic act of testimony, namely, that of drawing the listener into the speaker’s witnessing. That is, the metaphor is doubly expressive because it also is able to tell us something that the speaker himself doesn’t know or is unable to recount precisely because he has not “experienced” it.
The event in question, if that is what we can call an experience that at the deepest and most fundamental level is “unassimilated”, to recall Caruth’s term, causes the shift or “turn” from sight into speech. Now, at first glance this looks like a fairly orthodox Romantic move: faced with a crisis of representation, the speaker performs an inward identification that raises sight to the level of in-sight and enables the speaker to express himself in silent communication with his beloved. This would conform to the ever ascending spiral of internal/external movement I sketched out at the beginning, where this moment marks the beginning of the turn away from the self in its state of crisis and provides it with the tools of objective reflection. As I said, for Laub and others, such an “externalization” of a traumatic event through historicization, narrativization and symbolization is crucial to the therapeutic process because it enables the sufferer to “literally transfer it onto another outside oneself.”[4]
The problem with this reading, of course, is that the internalization or Aufhebung of sight into the insight that is silent speech is one that requires that the “speech” does in fact remain silent, i.e. metaphorical, i.e. by implication, wordless, whereas what we find in Clare’s account are quite precisely and unmistakably words: “Words from my eyes did start.” In a strange twist, words are expected to carry the metaphorical burden of communication. That is, they must double up and become metaphors of themselves if the wider metaphorical economy of insight and silent speech is to succeed and inaugurate the process of the speaker’s recovery. The pattern is thus not a smooth dialectical movement from outside to inside and back again but more like an interior 8: one element has to do double duty as both the literal and figural pole in the metaphorical exchange.
The result of this dédoublement is an “eclipse” at the figurative level comparable to the one we saw occurring thematically. Both the thematic and the rhetorical systems successfully install a center around which a metaphorical galaxy can orbit, in one case, an “I” or a self that has been installed as the center of a loving, temporal universe now divided between distinctions of movement and stasis, light and dark, being and non-being. In the other, the center appears as a perceptual “eye” that stabilizes a figurative system, enabling sight and in-sight to seamlessly exchange for one another. But in both cases, this installation of a center is achieved at the cost of that very center itself. The center, in each case, is doubled or, rather, split. For the self around which the loving, temporal economy revolves is one that is radically divorced from the “light” of that same economy, trapped as it is in permanent night behind its own “shadow.” By the same token, the metaphorical cosmology of insight and exchange is founded on the dédoublement of its axial point, the “words” which must stand in purely for themselves. The result is the permanent winter of a symbolic economy whose apparently volitional system of “choice” in the third stanza (“are flowers the winter’s choice?”) reveals no more agency than is found in the mechanical switching of light and dark in the planetary rotation. Clare’s I is a “sun” that makes metaphorical flowers bloom but only in the form of ice crystals, reproducing in senseless masses under the formal constraints – the growing blanket – of grammatical “snow.” By this point, the blossoming, life-giving flower-face of the first stanza has finally shed its decorative, that is, protective petals to show itself in its unveiled state: as blank, incommunicative and eye-less as the cliff-face of the original catachresis that, in a “violent, forced and abusive transfer,” (to use Hillis Miller’s formulation) first gave a name to what is nameless. To nevertheless still be able to call such a face “sweet,” as Clare does, is testament only to the extraordinary strength of aesthetic power possessed by a representational system that successfully denies its own ground.