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Ronald Lingat

AP Literature
Mrs. Mann
18 April 2016
Baby Dont Hurt Me No More
Every individual has a different definition of what love is. To some, love is a beautiful
thing that makes the heart flutter uncontrollably. Love can give us strength and resolve.
However, love is also extremely cruel. Love can destroy a persons entire being and change their
life forever. Personally, I know all too well the extent of which heartbreak can drive a person
mad. We begin to question ourselves. Why am I so stupid? What am I even doing right
now? Will I ever be the same? We question our ability to take chances and lay emotionally
exposed for other people ever again. And sometimes, the answer is simply no. John Donne,
author of the poem The Broken Heart, exemplifies loves cruel nature-that sometimes it
destroys us a whole lot more than we let on.
Loves interesting nature comes from the significant amount of power it holds over the
individual person. When its good, its really good. We feel like we witness a flash of powder
burn a day, like fireworks are exploding in our bellies. Laughing and being joyful with a loved
one brings us indescribable joy, no matter the amount of time we are restricted by. Even if we
had only been in love an hour, the happiness we feel devours us completely. Donne
exemplifies this feeling within the the beginning of his poem, as he speaks of the incredible joy
he felt while in his loved ones presence. He conveys truly devouring emotions of happiness, yet
each syllable of joy is equally matched by a tinge of black sadness.

Loves tendency to consume our nature in a shroud of negativity is fully colored in the
following sections of his poem. As it takes over the multiple facets of our happiness, it also
easily turns our joy into pain. It swallows us and never chaws, eating our feelings whole and
spitting them back in our faces like theyre no more than undesirable food. It is the tyrant pike
that at one first blow did shiver it as glass. With lines like these, Donne emphasizes the
suffering love has the ability to cause to a persons psyche. He compares love to a deadly weapon
that cuts and destroys so deeply that damage has the ability to be life changing. Sometimes it can
feel like, my breast hath all those pieces still/though they be not unite/And now as broken
glasses show/A hundred lesser faces, so/My rags of heart.../Can love no more. Donne states that
loving can shatter our hearts into miniscule pieces that can never be rectified. He likens the
feeling to attempting to glue together a broken porcelain figure with a missing piece; there is no
way to completely restore the fragile structure back to its former glory. The whole heart can
never be whole again.
Through this work Donne creates a doomed journey of love and loss that shows us the
depth of emotional damage love causes. It can be our strength. Our resolve. The reason a mother
works herself to the bone for her children or simply the reason for why we get up in the morning.
However, as easily as it is these things, it is also be our pain. Our sorrow. The reason for why we
want to lay in bed all day crying or even why we want to just sleep. Forever. Loves dominance
over our routines and our overall societal outlook is one of the most distinct marks of humanity
present in our global community. It is one idea that binds every person in the world, be that bind
be a negative or positive one.

Revisions:
Conclusion statement is more fleshed out: Rhiannon suggested that I create a more finalizing
statement that bound the whole essays main points, both positive and negative aspects of love,
more effectively. I opted to make the conclusion a bit more epic and emphasizing than it already
was.
Body Paragraphs connect more to text: I attempted to find additional places to insert the authors
name and his opinion into my analysis of the poem. I kept the commentary that I already had, but
inserted more textual examples to add emphasis to what I was trying to say.
Less anecdotal: Quinn suggested that I make my opening paragraph less anecdotal than what I
had originally intended. My original draft included more statements like personally and I
have had firsthand that took away from the essays tone.

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