The Broken Heart Analysis

“The Broken Heart” Analysis In John Donne’s poem, “The Broken Heart”, Donne shows the predacious nature of love and the true faintness of the heart through the use of metaphors. This poem sets a mood of despair and sorrow; moods that reveal the regret of love. It opens the reader’s eyes to realize just how vulnerable the heart can be when dealing with love. Donne associates love with the negative; he portrays it as some evil entity that overtakes people without warning and, if not careful, destroys them from the inside, out. In the first stanza of Donne’s poem, he describes how long the oh-so-terrible phenomenon of love lasts. He compares it to the plague and claims it has stuck with him for an entire year. He states that anyone who claims to have only been in love an hour, or a short duration at all, “is stark mad.” Donne makes a clear point that love simply cannot decay so soon. He compares the duration of love to a flask of powder burning in one day. I assume that it would take quite some time to use an entire flask of powder given the context of the text [small amounts of gun powder was used in the 1700’s and 1800’s for guns each time they were to be fired, and unless one of the soldiers chambered every round as fast as a sub-machine gun, it is very unlikely that they would have gone through an entire flask in one day]. Stanza two reveals Donne’s ideas about the characteristics of love and the heart. He says that once the heart has fallen into the hands of love, it becomes a trifle, an insignificant morsel within the chest cavity. He makes love out to be some sort of mythical predatory creature or an all-powerful army when he writes “he swallows, and never chaws: By him, as by chain’d shot, whole ranks to die, he is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.” This extended metaphor shows love being the aggressor in a situation, creating images of love swallowing the heart whole, a platoon of soldiers being gunned down by another force, and tyrant ruler