The Broken Heart

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Eric J. Shelton October 26, 2012 English 12 Period: 1B AP Essay “The Broken Heart” by John Donne In this poem, “The Broken Heart” John Donne uses vivid imagery to describe a relationship that ends with the speaker forced to pick up the broken pieces of his heart. Donne’s language and imagery portrays love as a vicious tyrant, violent and pitiless. In the first stanza Donne compares love to a plague and to gunpowder emphasizing how quickly love can lead to heartbreak. At the beginning of the stanza, he speaks of a man who says he has been in love an hour. Donne describes this man as “mad,” not because of how quickly this love “decayed,” but because in that time love could easily have devoured ten men. The choice of words Donne uses here expresses the destructive deadly power of love and relates it, with the word decay, to his comparison of love to an illness. In this comparison Donne says that none would believe a man who said he had survived the plague for a year, so too none would believe a person who says he has survived love so long without having his heart broken. Donne then also compares love to a container of gunpowder, saying it is foolish to think that it could take all day for the powder to burn and it is equally unreasonable that the flames of love could burn so long before consuming the heart of a lover. Using sickly and violent metaphors, Donne expresses how quickly love leads to a broken heart. In the second stanza Donne uses the metaphor of the “tyrant pike” to show love as something that eats us whole. The second half of the second stanza only concerns the pike. Donne uses the imagery of the fry, small fry, being eaten, possibly in a large group, by the pike to show the reader that our hearts are like a school of small fish being “swallowed” by the starving carnivore that is Love. Half way through his discussion of fish, Donne
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