Poetry Journal #4

Title: The Triple Fool
Style: Personal Response

S: A person in love
O: Telling his lover how his love for her has made him into 3x the fool
A: The lover
P: To expose the foolishness gained through explaining one’s love through poetry
S: Foolish love
Tone: whinny, story telling

In John Donne’s “The Triple Fool” he exposes the foolishness that he has gained by declaring his love through “whining poetry.” (3) Though he says in the beginning of the poem that he knows he is 2x the fool for loving and for declaring his love through poetry, he finds out that trying to relieve himself of that love through poetry has made him 3x the fool. He concludes that the best fools are the ones that have little wisdom. Donne does use a rhyme scheme; but, it is not completely definite. He also portrays his feelings with approximate rhyme. For example, in the first line of the first stanza, he says that he is “two fools” as opposed to twice the fool, emphasizing his foolishness to his lover. (1)
The idea of an emotion, normally thought of as good, causing more harm than good to the person eliciting the emotion is many times displayed in the media. On television shows and in movies, it is common to see characters losing the person they love or constantly enduring hardships because they are in love. Also, just as Donne attempted to get rid of his painful love by writing poetry, it is common to find people in movies and shows going through extreme changes in their life to dispose of the love that they always had. The difference is that the media is using these issues for entertainment purposes, whereas Donne is admitting to an action that his emotions made him think was possible. But, since the magic potion to entertainment is to appeal to our feelings towards our everyday life, it is possible that there are people today who feel the exact same way Donne does.