Broken Heart by John Donne

             During the eighteenth century, many poets explored the concepts of love. Many of these poems discussed lost loves, or unreturned love. John Donne discussed his feelings towards love in his poem "The Broken Heart." Donne personifies love in this poem by saying how once grasped by love, it is impossible to recover from it. .

             In the first stanza of "The Broken Heart" Donne opens by saying that love is not something that is limited by time. "He is stark mad, who ever says,/ That he hath been in love an hour,/ Yet not that love so soon decays," (l. 1-3). Donne is saying that love cannot be turned on and off. If one is in love his he cannot be in love one minute and not the next. He juxtaposes being in love for a minute to saying that one saw powder burn for a day or having the plague for a year. "Who will believe me./That I have had the plague a year?/ Who would not laugh at me, if I should say,/ I saw a flask of powder burn a day?" (l. 5-8) These things are impossible just as being in love for an hour are impossible.

             In the second stanza of the poem, Donne begins to why it is impossible for love to last for short period of time. He says love envelopes one's whole being. "Ah, what a trifle is a heart/ If once into love's hands it come!" (l. 9-10) The heart is like a toy once in the grasp of love. The heart is prey to love. ".Love draws,/ He swallows us and never chaws:/ By him, as by the chain'd shot, whole ranks do die./ He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry." (l. 13-16) Like a predator swallowing his prey, love swallows the heart whole and relentlessly. .

             In the next stanza Donne uses rhetorical question to ask if his analogy of how love affects the heart is not true than what did happen when he lost his heart to his love. "If 'twere not so, what did become/ Of my heart, when I first saw thee" (l. 17-18) When he went into the relationship he had a heart; however when it was over his love kept his heart.

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