"The Broken Heart"

"THE BROKEN HEART"
by John Donne

This poem describes the heart’s relationship with the personified love by using a variety of comparisons. Each stanza examines a different view of this love. In “The Broken Heart” John Donne uses violent imagery and personification to reveal the severe impact that love and heartbreak can have on a person’s life.

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?

 

Donne starts off by demonstrating the connection with time. The first stanza is focused on how others perceive love to be short lived, while he has been in love for a year. He describes how others might mock him if he revealed the dramatic effect that a simple “flash of powder” produced. The speaker uses negative words to describe love throughout the poem. In the first stanza he describes it as “decaying”, “devour” and “plague”. These words have connotations of illness and death, creating juxtaposition with the supposed love he is feeling. They also add a layer of intensity to his words, creating the sense seriousness that comes with life and death. Describing love as a force that seems to be killing him lets us see that the broken heart he describes in the title will not recover.

 

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.

 

The next stanza comments on the nature of a trifle heart when it falls in love. Eating imagery is used when describing how love draws us in. It seems almost as if we are prey to love, who is a hungry predator, so hungry for victims that “he swallows us and never chaws”. This predatory and violent view is also seen when love is described as a tyrant. A tyrant is a “cruel and oppressive ruler”. Love rules over all else, compelling and forcing its prey to suffer grief and die. When speaking of love, the description is ironic; however, the description fits in perfectly with a broken heart.

 

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.

                The speaker wallows in self- pity and sadness of losing his heart by falling his love. Personifying love allows us to feel that close connection and the loss that he feels from not carrying out his heart with him. He suffers because his beloved did not show affections towards him, as she would have if she felt the same way towards him. He remarks that “at one first blow did shiver it as glass”, adding fragility to his state of being.

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.

 

                Lastly, the speaker corrects his first assumption that his heart left him. He remarks that it cannot be gone since it has nowhere to go, explaining that the object of his affections did not accept his love, returning it back to him in pieces. This last stanza describes a physically broken heart, made of pieces of glass, a material that is fragile when whole and sharp and stabbing when broken. He goes on to say that he will never be able to fully recover and love another, even though he is able to “like, wish, and adore”.  This says that once a heart is broken, it can never recover, and that love is an all-consuming intensity that has the power to destroy.

 

 

 

Alice Hindman and Alice in Wonderland

Adventure: an exciting or very unusual experience/participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises/a bold or risky undertaking/to risk, to dare, to venture.

 

Alice Hindman, a quiet girl with a large head and a slight body, is the main character within Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Adventure” in Winesburg, Ohio. The name Alice brings us memories of grinning Cheshire cats and long, winding rabbit holes that lead to a wonderland of disproportion and riddles. Anderson’s “Adventure” compares with Lewis Carroll’s originally named Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to reveal the skewed self images that women hold.

Alice Liddell, a play on the word “little”, holds a confused sense of self. She constantly shifts sizes, from being too small to too large, representing her wavering ideas of whom she is. Similarly, Alice Hindman is described as having a large head that “overshadowed her body” (93). These disproportional bodies reveal the lopsided views that these women have of themselves. Alice H.’s head is way too large, suggesting self-consumption, while Alice L’s wavering body size, which at one point reaches up to one mile high, hints at insecurity. Any appearance that is not considered average draws attention from others, oftentimes leading to a lack of confidence. Alice’s fluctuating height is simply a representation of her already present insecurity that caused her to dream up a fantasy world as an escape.

Anderson displays how one who is lacking fulfillment in life will search out an outlet for that empty feeling. Alice Hindman is “betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life”, similar to how Alice Liddell is sucked down out of her dull and mediocre life into the world of impossibilities and adventures. This wonderland is what Alice H. experiences in her relationship with Ned Currie, the young man that grows to symbolize the concept of adventure for Alice. Their relationship was young, passionate, and dangerous. “A risky undertaking”, if I do say so myself. After he leaves, that loss that she feels is not heartbreak towards the city-bound man, but despair over losing what made her feel alive. She essentially “dies” when he leaves; losing the part of her that was awakened during their affair under the moon. This could be taken in both the sexual and the emotional sense. When Ned and Alice are intimate they spiritually become one, and her feelings of never being able to give herself to another man imply that she feels impure. Several religious allusions within this story demonstrate her attempts to find fulfillment. Wildly running naked through the rain is symbolic of the baptism that she desperately undergoes to seek renewal. However, no matter how many baptisms and “new beginnings” Alice Hindman goes through, she remains empty, still lacking the wonderland that she saw in the love of another.

Anderson’s “Adventure” and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland describe the empty void that humans feel and the ways in which we seek to fill them. Both Alice’s enter their wonderlands and experience an inexplicable loss when they “wake up”. Their adventures reveal the part of themselves that was dormant and gave them ephemeral fulfillment.

Christ in Winesburg, Ohio

Rusty nails driven through thick bone and delicate flesh. Blood streaming out of gaping holes, like an aged Merlot, slowly poured. This gruesome and torturous experience was common practice for punishment two millennia ago. Crucifixion, defined as “severe and unjust punishment or suffering” is a reoccurring phenomena that symbolically occurs within Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.  Many stories have allusions to personal suffering and as Christ-like figures are upon the discoveries of truth, or light. 

Dr. Percival instructs George of a truth that he entrusts him to write in a book in case anything were to happen to him. The simple idea is “that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified” (Anderson 39). This truth seems quite startling at first, and one instinctually begins writing him off as a poor, misunderstood lunatic, but there is in fact validity to what he says. A vast amount of grotesque characters within the book have a number of comparisons to Christ, and the number of biblical allusions is endless. The very first story, “The Book of the Grotesque”, which I might point out is singular, implying that there is only one, is about an old carpenter, who knows about the beautiful truths that people snatched up and led them to become grotesques. This old man, seemingly the author of the rest of the stories within the novel, could very well be George Willard. The common thread between all the stories and the young boy who eventually goes off into the city, George as the old man seems plausible because he is mentioned continuously. Many of the characters, like Dr. Percival and Kate Swift, confess their dreary lives to him, similar to how Christ hears all confessions of sin. Secondly, the fact that he is a carpenter, like Jesus, is a considerably significant sign. George as the omnipresent Christ figure within the novel appears in stories such as “Hands” and “Teacher”, which also include characters who are crucified.

Wing Biddlebaum, a confused old man who is described with overwhelming bird imagery, is trapped within his own body. His trembling hands flutter out to young boys to help them “dream”, and he is cast out of his town after one of his former students accuses him of inappropriate behavior. The poor man is ashamed, although he probably is not fully aware of what happened. He was a teacher (like Jesus), twelve men drove him out of the town that night (the number of disciples Jesus had), he is betrayed by one of his students (Jesus was betrayed by his disciple Judas), and he suffers for an act that he did not commit (self-explanatory).

Although he is one of the most intriguing, Wing is not the only Christ figure within the book. Kate Swift, another teacher, has some similarities also. She was an inspiration to a priest and she holds a truth within her that she desperately tries to tell George of. Kate, like many others within the novel, seems to be subject to severe punishment, crucifixion in itself.

There seem to be many connections between the characters within Winesburg, Ohio who are all similar in an innumerable amount of ways. They all hold their truths and all become grotesques- Christ figures written in this book by George Willard, a favor to the old Dr. Percival.

Tintern Abbey and Frankenstein

William Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”, less commonly known as “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798”, makes an appearance in Mary Shelley’s Novel Frankenstein, first published 20 years later in 1818.

Wordsworth’s poem flows through various descriptions of the nature that surrounds him. First from an external standpoint, and later from an internal reflection, he then goes into an analysis of different eras of his life. The third section of “Tintern Abbey” delves into the connection between external and internal. The nostalgic feel of the comparison between his past and present is overflowing with descriptive oxymorons. He describes his older and more mature attitude towards life as an “aching joy” and as hearing the “still sad music of humanity”. These elevated thoughts are no longer taking place in the abbey, and he is encroaching upon a universal truth of the struggle that exists between past and present, childhood and adulthood, thoughtless naivety and disturbing joy.

Mary Shelley’s novel encompasses a variety of themes, and on pages 138-139 Victor Frankenstein is describing the contrasting views that his deceased best friend held of the world and of the awe-inspiring nature which surrounded them. She includes the lines,

 

“The sounding cataract

Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to him

An appetite; a feeling, and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm.

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrow’d from the eye”.

 

Frankenstein describes his dear friend using this poem because it emphasizes the ardor with which Clerval truly loved nature. Furthermore, it draws a parallel between Henry Clerval and the younger self that Wordsworth is describing. This comparison brings with it an undertone of innocence and youth. Shelley writes that Clerval’s “wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibility of his heart…The scenery of external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with ardour” (Shelley 139).  The word chastened also makes an appearance in Wordsworth’s poem when he describes the “still, sad music of humanity” which has the “ample power to chasten and subdue”. This comparison between the gifted poet Wordsworth and Victor’s beloved friend Henry allows us to truly grasp with what depth Clerval relates to nature and the world which surrounds him. Wordsworth’s descriptions begin to include a “deeper zeal of holier love”, idolizing the nature that he personifies.

 

Henry Clerval, a “worshiper of Nature” is used in Shelley’s novel to bring us to the realization that Frankenstein is no longer able to experience life as his companion does. Lacking the innocence that he loses when he betrays God with the sin of rebellion, he is left a shell of his former being, no longer able to see nature with the divinity that it holds, or life with an eye of joy. The contrast between Clerval and Frankenstein is saddening because we long for our protagonist to experience the joy of life, although we know that he will be mourning the choices he made for the rest of his existence.