Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
First-person limited. Unlike a traditional love poem, the speaker is not recounting an experience of love for an individual person, but rather attempting to figure out the nature of love, and expressing his love for love itself.
Form and Meter
Four-line stanzas alternating between short lines of approximately 4 syllables and long lines of approximately 8 syllables. Each stanza rhymes ABAB.
Metaphors and Similes
In line 2, Clare uses simile to compare the earth's fading to dew. The simile stresses that things in this world are temporary while establishing dew as a symbol of ephemerality.
Alliteration and Assonance
Line 1, 5, and 21, alliteration of /l/, "love lives."
Line 6, alliteration of /h/, "happiness of healthy"
Irony
Ironically, though the poem praises lovers, the speaker experiences love at one remove. Rather than falling in love himself, he celebrates other lovers who are "faithful, fond and true."
Genre
Love poetry, religious poetry
Setting
The natural world, the countryside
Tone
Reflective
Protagonist and Antagonist
N/A
Major Conflict
The major conflict is between limits and limitlessness. In the first two stanzas, Clare casts love as the limitless alternative to the mortal world. However, in the next three stanzas, he suggests that love can't be fully separated from that world, and that it is in the world of natural things that we most frequently encounter love.
Climax
The climax of the poem occurs in the fifth stanza, where Clare asserts that there is no better voice for love than finite nature.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
Line 7, "Eve's dews may weep," likely alludes to the Christian story of creation and Adam and Eve's loss of paradise. Dew, a symbol of mortality, is a product of Eve's disobedience, which led to humankind being exiled from the garden of Eden.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
In line 10, Clare uses "hours" metonymically, to stand in for those months of the year when the world is green.
Personification
Clare personifies love as a living thing throughout the poem. He is adapting the Christian tradition of using love interchangeably with the person of God.
In the fifth stanza, Clare personifies nature. He describes the wind as its voice, and writes that through it, nature gives voice to love.
Hyperbole
N/A
Onomatopoeia
N/A
