The Broken Heart Analysis

To truly get the meter that drives "The Broken Heart," you have to be down with the iamb. If you're not already, though, don't worry. We can totally hook you up.You see, the iamb is just a two-syll...

The speaker of "The Broken Heart" is having some relationship trouble—to put it mildly. He's gone through the despair of heartbreak and is here to tell us that nothing, and he means nothing, is a...

Like the speaker himself (or herself), we don't have a ton of detail in this poem with respect to its setting. In fact, we can really only identify one physical setting here, which makes its appear...

Reading "The Broken Heart," you might expect that the most common sound effect would be the heartbroken sobs of the speaker, or maybe the mournful honking of him blowing his nose into his handkerch...

This may shock you, but "The Broken Heart" is a poem about…a broken heart. By the end of the poem, our speaker is basically busting out a broom and dustpan and sweeping up the shattered remnants...

John Donne is a poet who is most frequently associated with God, love, and, well, being clever. The religious and romantic aspects of his work are pretty easy to spot, but his cleverness takes a ke...

John Donne lived and wrote nearly 400 years ago so, yeah, there are going to be some rough patches on this hike, Shmoopers. That's why you have us, though, to point out all the "hath"s and "thee"s...

John Donne attended both Oxford and Cambridge (the smarty-pants), but didn't get a diploma from either one. (Source) After critic and writer Samuel Johnson criticized Donne's poetry, his work fell...

We're not exactly sure what goes on in that room, but we do know that nobody gets together in this poem. It's just sadness, heartbreak, and absolutely, positively no sexytime.