Falling in love, Clare suggests, is less a feeling than an accident. The opening line says so outright: "I ne'er was struck before that hour." The verb belongs to lightning and blows, not courtship, and what follows reads like a record of the damage. The speaker goes pale, his legs "refused to walk away," and his "life and all seemed turned to clay." The central idea is that first love arrives before understanding does. It happens to the body, overrides the will, and by the final lines cannot be undone: "My heart has left its dwelling-place / And can return no more."
The form helps the poem sound like a person still shaken by what happened. There are three stanzas of eight lines, each rhyming ABAB CDCD. The first runs in steady eight-syllable lines, brisk and almost breathless. In the second and third stanzas the lines alternate long and short ("The trees and bushes round the place / Seemed midnight at noonday"), a pattern familiar from ballads. The short lines land like a caught breath. The rhymes are plain and nearly all single syllables, and Clare even reuses "face" and "place" as rhyme words in two consecutive stanzas. The word "sweet" turns up three times. This could look unpolished, but it suits a speaker who has lost his words and can only say, again, that she is sweet.
The imagery moves through a rough sequence of bodily states. Her face "bloomed like a sweet flower," while his own face drains of colour. "Clay" then makes a sharp drop from living bloom to lifeless earth. Next the blood returns in a rush, and sight fails: noon turns to "midnight," a paradox that makes him blind in full daylight. Yet the eyes keep working in another way, since "words from my eyes did start; / They spoke as chords do from the string." Silent looking becomes music, and the sentence ends in fire: "blood burnt round my heart." The senses are scrambled, so that he cannot see but can speak, and what he says has no words in it.
The third stanza opens with two odd questions: "Are flowers the winter's choice? / Is love's bed always snow?" Clare gives no answer, and the meaning is open. Judging by the imagery, the speaker may be asking whether love must belong to something cold and barren. The flower from the first stanza returns, now set against winter. What follows is quietly hopeful: "She seemed to hear my silent voice." The verb "seemed" matters, because he cannot be certain she understood him, and the poem never claims she did. The earlier "what could I ail?", set in quotation marks, has a similar ambiguity. It could be her look asking a plain, homely question, or his own bewildered thought. Either way the language stays close to ordinary speech.
That plainness is much of what makes the poem worth reading. Clare was an English poet of the nineteenth century, and the images here (flowers, trees, bushes, snow, clay) all come from the natural world rather than from the stock decoration of love poetry. Nothing is dressed up. He does not praise the woman's qualities or promise anything. He records what the experience did to a body, and he lets the simplest words carry it.
The closing couplet of ideas also gives the title its weight. "First" means more than earliest. It is the love that moves the heart out of its old home, with no road back. The poem ends on the word "more," a small, flat word, and the flatness makes the loss sound final.