Close Reading of John Donne's "The Triple Fool"

In John Donne’s “The Triple Fool”, Donne conveys the idea that our emotions can be harnessed and controlled through poetry, but can be amplified through song. If we can channel these emotions and express them through verse, we can release ourselves from the binding and controlling power of such renegade emotions as love and grief.

Donne immediately grabs the reader’s attention in the first stanza by describing himself as nothing more than a mere fool. He goes against our expectations again by divulging that love and poetry are the things that have caused him to become this fool. When love comes to mind, most people associate positive, joyous experiences with the word. Ironically, Donne presents a different perception of love when he describes love as mere foolishness. The fact that he has been made a fool by love seems to have induced a cynical attitude from Donne towards love. He then goes on to describe his own poetry as “whining”. Some irony is implored once again as poetry, a piece of artwork that is normally considered a very beautiful, emotional work of art that allows people to connect with experiences that are exclusively human, is criticized. Donne does not portray his poetry in this sense at all, but rather chastises poetry for its irritable, often self-pitying, discourse.

The presence of commas in a piece of literature causes the reader to pause, focusing special attention on this part of the poem. This can help an author place more emphasis on certain parts of his writing by forcing the reader to ingest this part of the poem more slowly. At this point in the poem, at the beginning of line four, Donne makes an interesting change of rhythm in the poem. In the first three lines of the poem, Donne has used a total of four punctuation marks in a span of a mere fifteen words. The next four punctuation marks cover a space of thirty words. It is interesting that at this juncture in the poem, Donne decides to use less punctuation, causing the speed at which the poem is read to increase, forcing the reader to move much more quickly through this middle part of the first stanza. It seems that at this point Donne wishes to usher the reader to the end of the stanza. As soon as the reader finds himself towards the end of the stanza, Donne reveals that emotions such as love and grief can be tamed and controlled through poetry. This seems to contrast with the idea of his poetry as “whining” in the first part of the stanza. The reader is hurried from a negative view of poetry to the perception of poetry as a tool that can harness one of the most difficult concepts in the human experience, emotion.

Donne throws yet another curveball by beginning the second stanza with the word “but”. This alerts the reader to the fact that Donne is about to once again diverge from the positive perception of poetry that ended the first stanza. The “but” leads the reader to find that some man will inevitably turn the poetry into a song in an effort to show off his “art and voice”. It seems that others just cannot leave well enough alone and must try to transfigure this beautiful piece of writing into something more. This detracts from poetry’s ability to wrestle with and overcome emotion. This transformation of the poetry unavoidably leads to the resurrection of intense emotion from the work, allowing emotion to usurp peace of mind once again.

To emphasize this point, Donne makes a very important grammatical maneuver. The fourth line of the second stanza abruptly ends so that the word grief, capitalized, opens the fifth line. By doing this, significance is placed on the idea that the singer’s actions release grief from its prison, poetry. Donne implores the use of this metaphor because of the connotation it implies about emotion. Through phrases such as “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce” and “Doth set and sing my pain”, emotion is characterized as a part of human experience that is not necessarily positive. The use of words such as fierce and pain clearly relay this negative message about emotion. The prison metaphor is effective because when one thinks about prisons, images of malicious and devilish criminals comes to mind. By using this metaphor, emotion is accused of being some kind of rogue human experience that cannot function in society and should be locked in a prison cell to prevent it from causing any more harm to humanity.

The poem then reverts back to the same form used in the first stanza and uses punctuation less often in the following four lines of the piece. In the ninth line of the second stanza, an emotionally charged word is used yet again to denote the importance of the message. In this line, emotion “triumphs” when transposed into song. By converting this poetry to song, the “triumphs” of emotions such as grief and love are published and thus made known to the masses. This action allows the power and magnitude of emotion to resurge and capture people, wreaking havoc as it flows unchecked through a defenseless society.

“The Triple Fool” explores a concept that many writers and poets are afraid to confront. Often times, it is easier to look the other way when meeting face to face with the fact that emotions have a vast influence over how the human experience is perceived and confronted. The ability of poetry to wrestle with these emotions is important in helping to better understand why people feel, act, and live out their lives the way that they do. The poem offers hope while simultaneously offering a warning. Even though poetry offers a medium through which the human experience can be understood, if put into the wrong hands it can be exploited and used in a manner that allows emotion to escape and once again elude the human mind, body, and spirit.