"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.