A Comparison on These Two Poems – ‘First Love’ by John Clare ------------------------------------------------- and ‘the First Day’ by Christina Georgina Rossetti

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Write a comparison on these two poems – ‘First Love’ by John Clare
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and ‘The First Day’ by Christina Georgina Rossetti - .

Both John Clare and by Christina Georgina Rossetti choose to work within the constraints of a given form, as poets enjoy the technical challenge as well as the discipline. However, some people believe that this restricts the writer’s ability to express him or herself properly. This is not the case in ‘The First Day’ and ‘First Love’ who demonstrate a clearer understanding of structure in form by writing a poem as a lyric in iambic tetrameter and a sonnet in iambic pentameter. The form provides a set of labels that run across time, which poets of the 20th and 21st centauries admire when writing to the same basic rules, like those before them.  
A key theme in these two poems is time. Although the longevity of the time talked about by these two poets is very different, the simple impact and reflection on time, shows the importance to both the greater meaning poem and the authors understanding of time with love overall. John Clare talks about imminent love, by using the lexis of ‘struck’ and ‘sudden’. To him the love is here and now, it is so overwhelming its consuming him, so much so, that he can ‘not see a single thing’. This disorientation over this single moment, happening in his present, tells the reader of not only the importance of this moment but how overpowering can be, for him, even if it is just for an instance. In comparison the time Christina Georgina Rossetti is talking about has long passed and she is trying to reflect back on it. The distraught and desperate nature of her opening lines reveal her trying to recall the first time she met the love of her life, but can’t as at the time she did not realise the significance of that one single meeting. The insightful imagery shows the reader how little she can remember. However, the...