He is stark mad, whoever says,


    That he hath been in love an hour,

Yet not that love so soon decays,

    But that it can ten in less space devour ;

Who will believe me, if I swear

That I have had the plague a year?

    Who would not laugh at me, if I should say

    I saw a flash of powder burn a day?

Ah, what a trifle is a heart,

    If once into love's hands it come !

All other griefs allow a part

    To other griefs, and ask themselves but some ;

They come to us, but us love draws ;

He swallows us and never chaws ;

    By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die ;

    He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.

If 'twere not so, what did become

    Of my heart when I first saw thee?

I brought a heart into the room,

    But from the room I carried none with me.

If it had gone to thee, I know

Mine would have taught thine heart to show

    More pity unto me ; but Love, alas !

    At one first blow did shiver it as glass.

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,

    Nor any place be empty quite ;

Therefore I think my breast hath all

    Those pieces still, though they be not unite ;

And now, as broken glasses show

A hundred lesser faces, so

    My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,

    But after one such love, can love no more.

THE BROKEN HEART


by John Donne

Sunday, August 21, 2011

The conceit in the final stanza of this poem is one of the best.  His broken heart, he says, is a shattered mirror, which can’t reflect an exact, complete  image of his girl just the same way he can’t completely or exactly love again.  It’s also a great example of one of his oblique arguments.  He rails against love itself rather than scolding the woman.  He uses hyperbole to  describe how powerful love is, implying that she is so awesome that she inspires all consuming passion in him. That way, maybe she’ll  kiss him and stuff.  ( AND STUFF)

Note that the title is only objectively dealt with in the last stanza, but if we take it as a starting point, that he writes this with a broken heart, the other conceits make more sense.

Love is a destructive force in the first stanza.  It devours ten lovers in an hour.  It’s a plague.  It’s like gunpowder that destroys once it’s ignited.  His love is even worse because of its longevity.  The plague is supposed to kill in a few days, but love has been killing him for a year.  Gunpowder blows up in a second, but he’s been exploding with desire for a day.

Now love is a nasty guy.  He toys with our hearts.  He’s selfish, since the misery of love is so consuming that he won’t let us consider other miseries.  He attracts us, rather than attacks us like other griefs.

Line 14 works better with line 16 than with line 15.  He’s like a big fish that swallows us little minnows whole.  In line 15, he’s like the chains that people used to fire out of cannons to kill and maim whole ranks of the enemy as they hurtled and spun.

Here the poem gets intimate.  He lost his heart when he first saw her.  (Think of Romeo seeing Juliet across a crowded room.)

Where is his heart?  Well, she doesn’t have it, because it would teach her to love him.  No, Love himself, that creep, must have taken it and smashed it like a mirror.  (“Glass” in this case means looking glass.)

The final stanza begins with a law of physics, the conservation of matter and energy! See, no thing can become nothing.  Also, no space can be totally empty.  (Even deep space has a few electrons and gamma rays zipping around in it, not to mention dark matter.)

So, his breast must have something in it... the broken pieces of his heart.  His heart-mirror now can only reflect pieces of her, and the heart itself can only experience pieces of love: liking, wishing, adoring, etc.  He won’t ever be able to totally love again.  This, of course, represents another principle of physics: entropy.

Is it true?  I mean, that’s the final test of great literature, whether it rings true across the ages.  Yeah, for me at least.  Once I was totally in love, but the woman wasn’t.  I could be attracted to other women, I could like them and want them, but I couldn’t recapture that 100% feeling.  If you’re thinking, “Well, does this mean I won’t ever feel more deeply than I did about my first crush?” it might.  But, I also learned from love that I hadn’t really been in love before.  So maybe you’ve got something to look forward to, or to fear, since you’ll be walking around fizzing like a powder keg.

The Broken Heart