“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,
1
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 nonbeing. 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
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
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 reexternalization 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
4
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-
5
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.
It is not hard to see how such a self-doubling at both thematic and rhetorical levels
repeats the psychoanalytic (and deeply Romantic) insight that the becoming-subject must
simultaneously “lose” itself at the very moment it “becomes” itself. Clare’s poem gives a
very clear impression of how becoming a subject is always already a self-eclipse. That
this possesses a different structure than a logical division between a primary and a
secondary love as in Freudian narcissism should also be clear. In the Freudian schema, a
primary narcissism provides the foundations for a subsequent secondary love. In Clare,
however, not only is there no “foundation” for a subject before it “becomes” an “I” in
first love, that subject itself has no real fundament. It “is” both itself and its own nonbeing, the shadow that stands in “its” way. The split, in other words, is not
chronologically divided between a before and after, but possesses the structure of a
both/and. An early British Rimbaud, Clare’s I “is” both itself and an other – with the
implication that any actual lover (or analytic listener) must always make up a third.
However, Clare then goes a step further to reveal something rather interesting and
perhaps a little less familiar about the subject’s symbolic or metaphorical cosmology.
This is the way such an economy is itself productive of the crisis from which it is
supposed to “save” us. To explain this, let us look again at the critical moment when,
with the blood rushing to his face, the speaker cries out how he “could not see a single
thing.” This statement is of course ambiguous. It describes three possibilities: either the
speaker is blind, and therefore incapable of seeing anything. In this case, the subject has
been wholly absorbed by the other in a kind of Imaginary fixation. Or it describes a
failure of definition. The speaker sees not one thing, but many things. Here, love causes
the subject to step outside an oppositionally-driven economy centered around the One or
6
the Same so as to inhabit a Real of pure, undefinable multiplicity. Or, finally, it conveys
the experience of seeing nothing: there is nothing to see which, as psychoanalysis tell us,
is potentially a profoundly traumatic event, at least some very young boys’ lives.
Nevertheless, when the “words” suddenly “start” from the speaker’s eyes, I suggest, they
provide a reading of that line that retroactively decides it as the last possibility, as a
statement about blindness. The “words” quite literally block the speaker’s view – they
“start” or begin the turning of the metaphorical orbital system in a specific direction
which might otherwise, potentially, have gone a different way. They confirm that the
speaker cannot see by literally standing in his way, in effect creating a representational
crisis where there was not (necessarily) one before. In other words, they transform a
potential ontological crisis – the crisis of being that is raised by the presence of a nothing
where one expects there to be something – into a crisis of perception: it was not that there
was “nothing” to see. I could see nothing because I was (safely) blind.
It is this “other seen,” or rather “other seens” – the alternative readings that the
metaphorical or, in Lacan’s terms, “phallic” economy, immediately leaps in to preclude –
that constitute what I was calling an event that never actually “took place.” It never “took
place” because in the either/or of the phallic economy, it has no “place”: there is no time
or moment “before” the subject that speaks or, in Clare’s terms, loves. It “exists” or
perhaps better “insists” in another “universe” remote from our symbolic solar system.
And yet the potential “ex-sistence” of these other universes (whose presence we detect in
the odd and suggestive fact that Clare wrote not one but two poems titled ‘First Love’)
should make us momentarily pause and reflect how the harmonizing metaphorical
economy that “saves” the subject by confirming that he was blind remains as deluded as
imagining that the sun revolves around the earth. This is solely a perspective derived
from seeing the sun from our “place” on earth. And, by the same token, a symbolic
economy that installs us in its center as speaking subjects remains just as deluded.
Running counter to everything we’ve always been told, the phallus is not what “saves” us
(as, for example, in Lacan’s famous image from Tin Tin of the phallus preventing the
jaws of the crocodile-mother from closing). As Clare helps us to see, the phallus is itself
productive of the “crisis” (of representation) from which it purports to “rescue” us.
Conceived as the “cut” of (the first or “paternal”) metaphor – what I previously called the
“original catachresis – that delivers us from the non-differentiated space of the presymbolic and inserts us into the solar economy of desire, the phallus doesn’t orbit us,
stepping in at the last moment like a Deus ex machina to mark out the boundaries of our
representational system. Rather, we trail it like dirty lumps of space junk in its uncharted,
meteoric wake.
Rather than tautology, then, the trope of first love must be hysteron proteron, the disorder
of time. First love, then the subject: what should be first comes last. The subject comes
into being only after a primary experience that never did occur. This experience, “first
love,” can now be given its proper psychoanalytic name, sexuation. Because it is
sexuation that brings death into the world – as Paul Verhaeghe has put it, “the sexed life
makes death a necessary consequence” – first love “is” nothing but the subject’s death
prior to “its” life. One must “die” before being “born.” Such is John Clare’s twist on the
famous Oedipal lament.5
7
1
Freud encountered a similar structural problem while developing his concept of
repression, obliging him to postulate behind repression an even more “primary” form.
2
Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” The Resistance to Theory, foreword Wlad
Godzich (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 31.
3
Note that the version of “First Love” in James Reeves’ edited volume diverges radically
at this point from the Summerfield and Robinson (?check) edited poem I am using here.
In the Reeves edition, the line reads, “She seemed to hear my silent voice/ And love’s
appeals to know.” In both versions, the implication is of a communication that has been
“heard” but understood differently. In one, the communication succeeds in conveying
love’s appeal and, hence, provides a negative answer to the rhetorical question, while the
other (which strikes me as much more editorially plausible) is the conveyance of a
communication about the eternal failure of love’s promised communication. Selected
Poems of John Clare, ed. and intro. James Reeves (London: Heineman, 1954; repr. 1968)
129.
4
“[. . .] and then take it back again, inside”, he continues. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness
or the Vicissitudes of Listening” in Felman and Laub, 69.
5
Oedipus’s last words in the Sophocles play are “Me funai” – better not to be.
8