by John Donne
The speaker contains a broken heart. He says that it's ludicrous to argue that somebody can’t fall out of affection quickly, though he himself has felt the plague of a broken heart for a year. A broken heart is an awesome grief. during a single blow, his beloved shattered his heart. Now, like a broken mirror, the many pieces of his heart can reflect minor feelings such as adoration, but his breast “can love no more.”
Synoptic view
“The Broken Heart” has four octets following an ababccdd rhyme scheme. Although the key image in the poem is a heart broken into a hundred pieces, the poem has a well-ordered pattern.
The poet begins with the strong statement that anyone who disagrees with his argument about love is “stark mad” (line 1). The “mad” view is that love cannot wane quickly even though it can be sparked quickly. The poet, in contrast, claims that anyone who has been in love even an hour cannot help but notice how much more quickly love can turn to pain and loss. The proper thing is to know that a person cannot really have the plague for a year, unless he means the plague of love—and that a flash of gunpowder cannot last for a whole day. The suggestion here is that the poet’s heart has burned for a year while his beloved’s attentions burned away in merely a moment.
The second stanza moves to the all-consuming nature of love (like burning up, as hinted at the end of the first stanza). The poet compares love to “other griefs” (line 11), thus characterizing the longing of love pains as negative. Other griefs allow other sorrows to coexist within the sufferer (lines 11-12), but love does not. Also, these other griefs are figured as happening to people—they come to us through the course of living—whereas love “draws” us to itself (line 13). In line 14 Donne uses personification to make love a “he,” a devouring monster who “swallows us and never chaws” (line 14). Love is a warlike destroyer, like cannonballs connected by a chain (“chain’d shot,” line 15) that kill entire rows of enemy soldiers, or like the large fish (a pike) that swallows massive numbers of small-fry fish (line 16). In these images, the lover has little or no agency, totally consumed by love.
The third stanza becomes more personal, addressing the one who broke his heart. He describes walking into an area and seeing somebody with whom he fell dotty initially sight. within the conceit during which a heart represents love, he argues that he lost his heart to the beloved, however not as a result of it had been preoccupied by the beloved. That is, the beloved would have shown him pity because the lover, however instead she shattered it during a single blow, demonstrating that she failed to love him reciprocally.
Thus, the ultimate textual matter considers the items of this broken heart. Since “nothing will to nada fall” (line 25), his heart’s items haven't merely disappeared; he currently carries “Those items still” in his breast (lines 27-28). The fragments square measure sort of a broken mirror, reflective a “hundred lesser faces” (line 30), as if he still has feelings for his beloved. Yet, his heart will solely feel lesser emotions currently that it's in items. It will “like, wish, and adore,” however it will “love no more” (lines 31-32). His heart has become irreparably broken “after one such love,” scarring him always and feat his feelings metaphorically in rags, decreasing his capability to ever love once more.
This literary work has very little if any figure of speech in it. It doesn't appear strange to assume that one’s heart is in barely 100 items instead of, say, a billion just like the stars scattered across the sky. It additionally doesn't appear uncommon to mention that chains of cannonballs might kill whole ranks of troopers directly, instead of whole armies. The measured representational process during this poem—after all, the primary paragraph argues that exaggerating regarding love is madness—suggests that the reader ought to take the literary work as extremely a few broken heart instead of craving for a metaphysical that means. For this reason the literary work appears strictly lay, considering the sentiments of romantic love and loss instead of non secular love. Perhaps, however, we would see during this literary work a divine grievance regarding God giving his all, his solely son, to indicate like to group, nonetheless being rejected.
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