W. H. Davies’s “An Early Love” is a small, warm poem about how a first infatuation turns an ordinary part of a person—hair—into something dazzling and mythic. The speaker remembers a girl whose golden hair he played with and wore, and the poem suggests that this private, make-believe treasure mattered more than a legendary hero’s prize.
The poem’s shape is deliberately simple. Each stanza is a four-line ballad quatrain, with alternating tetrameter and trimeter, and second and fourth lines rhyming. That folk-like pattern gives the memory a songlike quality, which suits a speaker recalling early love. Within this plain frame, though, the imagery keeps swelling outward. The opening links youth to “sweet young blood” and to joy so powerful that “dying children dance with it.” The phrase is strange and a little unsettling: it makes youthful feeling sound like a force that can briefly defy even death. That note of excess matters because the rest of the poem is about excess of adoration.
In the second stanza, the speaker sets up a difference between himself and the beloved: “My dreams were blossoms, hers the fruit.” Blossoms are promise; fruit is fulfilment. She is the more solid, richer figure, and he becomes the one who tends and decorates her. The action is tactile. With “gentle hand” he makes “playthings of her hair,” wrapping it into “rings of gold” around his fingers and “bangles” around his wrist. The phrase “soft, warm thing” pulls the fantasy back to the body—hair is not just a symbol of gold, it is warm and alive. The speaker is not admiring from a distance; he is touching, shaping, wearing her hair. The progression from rings to bangles to a fist-glove also matters: he wraps more and more of himself in her hair, as if trying to keep her warmth against his skin. Love here is both innocent and possessive.
The crown image extends the play. He swears she “should have a crown,” but the gold would be only a setting for “stones more rich / Than that fine metal stuff.” The real treasure is not the metal but what it holds—or perhaps what it surrounds. That refusal to let gold be the highest value runs through the poem. Gold keeps appearing, but always as something to be touched, twisted, and outdone. In the final stanza, the speaker reaches for the grandest comparison available: “Her golden hair gave me more joy / Than Jason’s heart could hold, / When all his men cried out—Ah, look! / He has the Fleece of Gold!” Jason’s quest is one of the great myths of heroic effort, yet the speaker claims a greater joy in a girl’s hair. The dash before “Ah, look!” acts like a sudden cry of triumph, but the triumph is private and almost domestic. The poem borrows the language of public legend, yet the object of desire remains a single girl’s hair, not a nation’s treasure.
The poem’s power lies in its dramatic shift of scale. It takes a small childhood or adolescent memory—making rings from a sweetheart’s hair—and measures it against the heroic past without making the speaker seem foolish. The ballad form keeps the tone light, but the imagery of crowns, jewels, and the Golden Fleece gives the feeling weight. Davies suggests that first love has its own mythology. Its gold is not mined or won through danger; it is found nearby, in the warm hair of another person. “An Early Love” is not a record of loss or adult irony. It stays inside the moment of adoration, when the beloved’s hair could become a crown, a glove, and a legendary fleece all at once. In that way the poem is both a love lyric and a defense of imaginative play: the boy who has no real gold can still feel richer than Jason because what he loves is close enough to touch.