Summary
The speaker declares that any man who claims he has been
in love for an hour is insane; not because love “decays” in so short
a time, but because, in an hour, love can “devour” ten men—in other
words, not because love itself is destroyed in an hour, but because
it will destroy the lover in much less time than that. To explain himself,
the speaker uses an analogy: He says that anyone who heard him claim
to have had the plague for an entire year would disbelieve him because
the plague would have killed him in much less time than that. He also
says that anyone who heard him claim to have seen a flask of gunpowder
burn for an entire day would laugh at him because the flask would
have exploded immediately. Like the plague and the powder-flask,
love works violently and swiftly.
“What a trifle is a heart,” the speaker says, “If once
into Love’s hands it come!” Unlike love, other feelings and “other
griefs” do not demand the entire heart, only a part of it. Other
griefs “come to us” but Love draws us to it, swallowing us whole.
Masses of people are felled by Love as ranks of soldiers are felled
by chain-shot. Love is like a ravenous pike, and our hearts are
like the small fish it feasts on.
Addressing his beloved, the speaker asks her a question:
If what he says about love is false, then what happened to his heart
the first time he saw her? He says that he entered the room with
a heart, and left the room without one. If his heart had been captured
whole by his beloved, he says, it would have taught her to treat him
more kindly; instead, the impact of love shattered his heart “as
glass.”
Still, he says, a thing cannot be so utterly destroyed
that it becomes nothing; the pieces of his shattered
heart are still in his breast. In the same way that a broken mirror
reflects “a hundred lesser faces,” the speaker says that his “rags
of heart” can “like, wish, and adore”; but after experiencing the
shock of “one such love,” they can never love again.
Form
The four regular stanzas of “The Broken Heart” utilize
Donne’s characteristically angular iambic meters; each stanza is
eight lines long, with lines one, two, three, five, and six in iambic
tetrameter, and lines four, seven, and eight in iambic pentameter.
(The line-stress pattern, therefore, is 44454455 in
each stanza.) Each stanza follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDD.
Commentary
“The Broken Heart” is an excellent example of Donne’s
style in his metaphysical mode, transforming a relatively simple
idea (that love destroys the hearts that feel it) into an oblique,
elaborate meditation full of startling images (the burning powder-flask,
love as a carnivorous fish) and implications. Structurally, the
poem looks at its theme from a different angle in each of its stanzas.
The first stanza is metaphorical and explanatory, establishing the
basic idea of the poem by showing that to be in love for an entire
hour would be like having the plague for a year or seeing a flask
of gunpowder burn for an entire day; love is instant, like the explosion
of the flask. The second stanza personifies love as a kind of monster
that destroys human beings, trifling with hearts, swallowing men
whole (he “never chaws”), killing whole ranks, and devouring men
as a pike devours smaller fish (“He is the tyrant pike, our hearts
the fry”).
