Dreams rarely finish what they start, and Michael John Pickering's «A Dream of First Love» is built around one unfinished gesture. A figure in crimson appears in a winter landscape, "offering me a winter schoolday prize", but we never see the prize taken. By the last line the figure has "escaped", and the speaker is left with something far vaguer than a memory: "a discoloured rhythm". The poem's central idea is that first love survives less as an event than as a mood, a flash of colour against a landscape that is already darkening.
That landscape is where the poem does most of its work. Almost every verb and adjective pulls downward. Stone is "slipped in earthy cliffs", the lane is "sunken", the wood stands "Low, in the brown valley, below", and the river runs "beneath" bridges, with the day "under" an arch. The place seems to be sinking into its own earth, which suits a dream, and also a memory. Even the cottages "stepped up on banks" as if they were climbing out of something. The roads are plural ("I saw you in roads"), so the setting feels like several places folded into one, as it does in dreams.
Against all this brown and black, the crimson dress is the only vivid thing. The comparison to "the trivial berries" is odd and rewarding. Berries on a winter hedge are the one bright thing in a bare season, yet the poet calls them "trivial", a word that shrinks them. It may hint at how the adult speaker sees his younger self's intensity: overwhelming then, small now. The next phrase, "darker than shadow", twists the colour again. Crimson is bright, but here it is darker than the dusk, so the figure is both glowing and already half lost in the gloom. "Schoolday prize" adds to this. It brings in childhood, the hush of a gift offered in public, and the sense of something earned that was never really his to keep.
The third stanza turns from the figure to the encroaching evening, and the syntax enacts it. The subject, "an unconquered wood", is held at the end of one line, and the verb waits on the next: "by black had shortened the hill for an early night." The darkness literally cuts the day short, as it does in winter. Then comes the fair, "with tinsel and tricked-out light", which is "shaking". The word could mean trembling with noise and music, or trembling like something fragile. Either way, this is cheap brightness set beside the dress's deeper colour, and it feels flimsy against the black.
The last stanza is the strangest. The day is "trounced", beaten like a fighter, and it is "bellowing under great round arch". The round vowels of "bellowing", "round" and "arch" seem to echo, as sound does under a bridge. Then the sentence breaks away with "and always," left hanging at the end of the line. The adverb stretches the loss across time, and the tense shifts to the past perfect: "you had escaped". The escape has happened before the speaker can notice it. He is always arriving after it.
In form, the poem is quietly controlled. It has four unrhymed tercets, and the lines run to around ten or eleven syllables, so they feel like loose blank verse. The lack of rhyme matters, because nothing is allowed to click shut. Each stanza is end-stopped, so the dream moves in separate scenes, but the lines inside them spill over awkwardly, like a mind trying to hold on to a picture.
The closing phrase may also be a comment on the poem itself. "Discoloured" suggests the crimson has faded, and "rhythm" is what a poem is made of. The speaker is left with only the beat and pattern of the experience, not the girl, and the poem we have just read is that rhythm. What makes it worth reading is its refusal to be sentimental. It does not say "I loved you" or "I miss you". It offers a landscape sinking into dusk, a single bright dress, and an ending that admits the colour has gone.