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 speaker has a broken heart. He says that it is ludicrous to argue that someone can’t fall out of love quickly, although he himself has felt the plague of a broken heart for a year. A broken heart is an overwhelming grief. In 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.”I)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 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 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.

II)

 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”).

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 (ghiulele) 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 (rol), totally consumed by love. “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 hungry pike (peste rapitor), and our hearts are like the small fish he eats.-fry- small fish

III)

In the third stanza, the speaker departs from the general and enters the specific, addressing his beloved and recalling the moment when love destroyed his heart, enabling him to understand that which he now writes in his poem; the instant he saw his beloved, love shattered his heart like glass. 

The third stanza becomes more personal, addressing the one who broke his heart. He describes walking into a room and seeing someone with whom he fell in love at first sight. In the conceit in which a heart represents love, he argues that he lost his heart to the beloved, but not because it was taken up by the beloved. That is, the beloved would have shown him pity as the lover, but instead she shattered it in a single blow, demonstrating that she did not love him in return. 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.”

IV)

The final stanza offers a kind of moral for the poem, (“nothing can to nothing fall, / Nor any place be empty quite”) detailing what happens to a heart after it has been shattered by the force of love. The heart remains, the speaker claims, in the breast, like pieces of a broken mirror, able to reflect lesser emotions, such as hope and affection, but never again to love.

Thus, the final stanza considers the pieces of this broken heart. Since “nothing can to nothing fall” (line 25), his heart’s pieces have not simply disappeared; he now carries “Those pieces still” in his breast (lines 27-28). The fragments are like a broken mirror, reflecting a “hundred lesser faces” (line 30), as though he still has feelings for his beloved. Yet, his heart can only feel lesser emotions now that it is in pieces. It can “like, wish, and adore,” but it can “love no more” (lines 31-32). His heart has become irreparably damaged “after one such love,” scarring him for life and leaving his feelings metaphorically in rags, diminishing his capacity to ever love again. 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.

 For this reason the poem seems purely secular(mundane- lumesc), considering the feelings of romantic love and loss rather than spiritual love. Perhaps, however, we might see in this poem a divine complaint about God giving his all, his only son, to show love to mankind, yet being rejected.

...It is remarkable for its unusual conception of love—not many poets would compare love to death by a violent disease—