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Posted by Melinda on February 06, 19102 at 20:32:36:
In Reply to: The Broken Heart posted by doll on February 12, 19101 at 14:25:30:
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 ogy: 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. Mes 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 gl."
Still, he says, a thing cannot be so utterly destroyed that it becomes nothing; the pieces of his shattered heart are still in his . 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.