In this poem, the speaker remembers a happy time in the past, in which she was not suffering the anxieties brought about by turbulent romantic relationships.
When I was happy alone, too young for love
The Four Leaf Clover by Winslow Homer
Wikimedia Commons
Or to be loved in any but a way
Cloudless and gentle, I would find the day
Long as I wished its length or web to weave.
In the first stanza, the persona enlarges on the way in which she could enjoy her day when she was “alone”, (without a partner) and “happy”. The combination of the adjectives “happy” and “alone” may have two different implications about her present: either that she is not happy alone anymore (and she worries because she has ended a relationship or because she wants to start one) or that she is not alone anymore but what makes her unhappy is the complexity of her present relationship.
The reason why she was “happy alone” in the past was that she was too young to know a love which was not ”cloudless and gentle”. The word “cloudless” may mean that the love she had known up to that moment was clear, i.e. nothing obscured it, and nothing made her doubt about it, or that it didn´t present any danger or menace (“clouds”) for her, i.e. it was constant. The adjective “gentle” seems to suggest that it was a moderate and delicate love, far away from stormy outburst of passion. We wonder if this love could be the love of family and friends.
