The Full Text of “A Jet Ring Sent”
1Thou art not so black as my heart,
2 Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art;
3What wouldst thou say? Shall both our properties by thee be spoke,
4Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?
5 Marriage rings are not of this stuff;
6 Oh, why should aught less precious or less tough,
7Figure our loves? Except in thy name thou have bid it say,
8“I’m cheap, and naught but fashion, fling me away.”
9 Yet stay with me since thou art come,
10 Circle this finger’s top, which didst her thumb;
11Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me,
12She that, oh, broke her faith, would soon break thee.
The Full Text of “A Jet Ring Sent”
1Thou art not so black as my heart,
2 Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art;
3What wouldst thou say? Shall both our properties by thee be spoke,
4Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?
5 Marriage rings are not of this stuff;
6 Oh, why should aught less precious or less tough,
7Figure our loves? Except in thy name thou have bid it say,
8“I’m cheap, and naught but fashion, fling me away.”
9 Yet stay with me since thou art come,
10 Circle this finger’s top, which didst her thumb;
11Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me,
12She that, oh, broke her faith, would soon break thee.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Introduction
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"A Jet Ring Sent" is John Donne's witty lament over an ill-fated love. The poem's speaker addresses the jet ring of the title—a present he sent to his beloved, but one that she has now returned to him, signaling the end of their relationship. Gazing at the ring now, the speaker sees it as a symbol of the whole affair: its brittleness reflects his lady's none-too-constant love, its blackness his own black sorrow in the wake of heartbreak. One person's profound love, the poem suggests, can turn out to be another's cheap fling. Like most of Donne's verse, this poem was only published posthumously in a 1633 collection, Poems.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Summary
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You, ring, are not as black as my heart is, and you're not half as brittle as her heart is. What would you say if you spoke? Would you declare both of our heart's natures: as endless as a circle, as easily broken as brittle stone?
Wedding rings don't get made of jet. Oh, why should any cheaper, weaker material than gold represent our loves? Your very name, jet, seems to say: "I'm cheap and nothing but a fleeting fashion: throw me away."
But since you're here with me, you might as well stay. Encircle the top of my finger, as you once encircled her thumb. Be suitably proud, and fortunately safe, now that you live with me: the lady who, oh, broke her promises to me, would soon have broken you.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Themes
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Unbalanced Love
In "A Jet Ring Sent," a heartbroken speaker laments over that titular jet ring (that is, a ring made of jet, a semiprecious black stone). This ring is a gift he once sent to his beloved. Now that this lady has broken things off and returned the ring to him, the speaker begins to see the ring as a perfect symbol for their whole relationship. The same love that one person sees as "endless," this poem will suggest, can all too easily seem like nothing but a cheap trinket to another.
When the speaker gave this ring to his beloved, he saw it as an image of one of the "properties" of his love. As a circle, with no beginning or end, the ring suggested that there was "nothing more endless" than his feelings for this lady. Alas, as he examines the ring in the wake of their breakup, he begins to see that it has a lot of unfortunate symbolic qualities, too.
While the ring was meant to express eternal love, it's made of jet, a material that's as "brittle" as his lady's heart turned out to be. Jet is also a deep, mournful black—though it's "not so black" as the speaker's heart feels, now that he's plunged into heartbreak. Perhaps worst of all, the very word "jet" contains an unhappy pun: in French, jette means "throw." By its very nature, the speaker concludes, the ring presaged what his lady was always going to do with his heart: treat it as something "cheap, and naught but fashion" (nothing but a passing fancy), and "fling it away."
The poem thus reflects that it's all too possible for one person's undying passion to be their beloved's brief bit of fun—their fling, if you will. (However, it does also raise the question of whether the speaker's love was as "endless" as he claims. As he himself points out, "marriage rings" aren't made of cheap, brittle jet, but gold. The ring he sent his lady was by no means that kind of promise of eternal love.)
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Jet Ring Sent”
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Lines 1-4
Thou art not so black as my heart,
Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art;
What wouldst thou say? Shall both our properties by thee be spoke,
Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?The speaker begins the poem with an apostrophe to the "Jet Ring" of the title. This ring—a ring made of jet, a deep black semiprecious stone—is a gift that he sent to his beloved. The lady has now returned the ring to him, symbolically signaling the end of their relationship.
All through this poem, the speaker will address the ring. Without ever explicitly describing his surroundings, he thus manages to paint a picture of himself, a man having a very bad day: all alone, with only a painful souvenir to talk to.
His first speech to this jet ring uses parallelism to draw an unflattering comparison between himself and the lady who has left him:
Thou art not so black as my heart,
Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art;The mirrored phrasing here emphasizes the difference between the two hearts in question:
- The speaker's heart is so darkened with sorrow that it's not merely as black as the jet ring (as a more commonplace simile-monger would have it), but blacker.
- And the lady's heart, as it has turned out, is not merely as brittle as the jet ring, but brittler by far. (And notice how the parallelism emphasizes the word that changes in this phrasing: the ring is "not so black" as the speaker's heart, but not "half so brittle" as the lady's. The internal rhyme of "her heart, thou art" adds a little extra jolt of emphasis, too.)
This ring, then, is doing double duty in the speaker's wounded mind. It's the perfect symbol of his heart and of his lady's heart—though for very different reasons. It shows that he is deeply hurt and that she is fickle and untrustworthy.
Noticing the complex symbolic power of this little ring, the speaker rhetorically asks it, "Shall both our properties by thee be spoke?": Can you express both my nature and my lady's? And again, the ring does double duty, striking a juxtaposition between the two lovers with swinging anaphora:
Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?
In being "endless"—because it's in the form of a circle, of course, with no beginning or end—the ring represents the speaker's unwavering love. But in being so easily breakable, it represents the lady's unreliable affections.
John Donne wrote many different kinds of poems about love and sex. There are his transcendent love poems, in which lovers melt into each other in ecstasies of quasi-religious passion. There are his carpe diem poems, in which a clever man finds witty ways to persuade a lady to sleep with him. And then there are his variously tormented, cynical, and vengeful poems about heartbreak and women's disloyalty. This will be one of the latter.
But "A Jet Ring Sent" will land on the intimate, melancholy side of the genre. Rather than raging against women's fickleness in general, this speaker laments his relationship with one fickle woman in particular.
Donne delivers this characteristically witty, pithy poem in characteristically complex verse. The meter here is primarily iambic: that is, the lines are built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "except." But in every stanza, the lines change length:
- The first line is always in tetrameter—a line of four beats.
- The second and fourth lines are always in pentameter—lines of five beats.
- And the third line is, to use an untechnical term, a whopper: a line of seven beats, sometimes known as a "fourteener" because, in iambs, such a line has fourteen syllables.
Within this already surprising, shifty stanza form, Donne gets up to all kinds of metrical tricks. Line 1, for instance, scans like this:
Thou art | not so | black as | my heart,
Donne thus kicks off what will become a primarily iambic poem with a line made mostly of bold, stress-forward trochees—the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Many such metrical variations appear all through this poem, helping to make the heartbroken speaker's voice sound ragged with anger and grief.
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Lines 5-8
Marriage rings are not of this stuff;
Oh, why should aught less precious or less tough,
Figure our loves? Except in thy name thou have bid it say,
“I’m cheap, and naught but fashion, fling me away.” -
Lines 9-12
Yet stay with me since thou art come,
Circle this finger’s top, which didst her thumb;
Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me,
She that, oh, broke her faith, would soon break thee.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Symbols
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The Jet Ring
The poem's speaker knows full well that the jet ring he describes throughout this poem "figure[s]" (or represents) the spoiled love that he and his lady shared: it's a perfect symbol of an imperfect romance.
Jet black, the ring is as dark as the speaker’s suffering heart (though the speaker insists his heart is even darker). “Brittle,” it’s as fragile as the lady’s heart proved to be (though, in fact, the speaker insists her heart is even more fragile—jet is "not half so brittle" as that treacherous organ). Cheap and fashionable (as compared to expensive, timeless gold), it suggests that the lady considered the speaker’s love a fleeting pleasure of little value.
Donne even manages to make the ring into an image for the two very different kinds of love that the speaker and his lady experienced. Its circular form makes its shape as “endless” as his love, but its fragility makes it as weak as her love.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
In his apostrophe to the jet ring his beloved has returned to him, the speaker muses on the ways in which its qualities reflect his experience of love (and especially of heartbreak). While its circularity makes it as “endless” as his passion, he tells it, its blackness also reflects his darkened heart and its fragility his lady’s inconstant affections. In having his speaker address these remarks directly to the ring, Donne conjures a lonely scene: a man gloomily talking to his own finger, in the absence of better company.
Particularly at the end of the poem, the speaker turns the ring into his confidante and his dependent, telling it, Be glad you’re with me now: “Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me.” For the ring is in good hands (if you will) with him, as it would not be with his careless lady: anyone who could “br[eak] her faith” so easily “would soon break thee,” he tells the ring. Through this apostrophe, the speaker suggests he's more tender-hearted than his lady. He’ll protect this heavily symbolic ring as if it were his little friend, and he'll likewise preserve the memory of this relationship and his “endless” passion, even though the affair is over.
By making his apostrophe to the ring, then, the speaker presents the ring as a living, responsive embodiment of his love—and of the memories he’ll shield, and the passion he’ll go on cherishing, even if the lady herself is gone.
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Simile
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Pun
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Repetition
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"A Jet Ring Sent" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Jet
- Thou art, thou dost
- Brittle
- Properties
- Aught
- Figure
- Except in thy name thou have bid it say [...]
- Bid it say
- Naught
- Since thou art come
- Dwell
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Jet is a semiprecious stone, famed for its deep black color, often used to make jewelry.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Jet Ring Sent”
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Form
This short poem is built from just three quatrains (four-line stanzas), all written in Donne's characteristically spiky, irregular meter. (As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once quipped, Donne's poetic muse seems to have trotted along on a camel: a bumpy ride!)
The poem's brevity suits its bitter tone. The poem's speaker is washing his hands of a lady who has "broke[n] her faith" with him, ending their relationship and breaking his heart in the process. Examining the fashionable jet ring he once sent this lady as a love token (a ring she has now returned to him), he observes their whole relationship reflected in its dark surface. The love he believed to be as "endless" as the ring's circle was in fact "brittle," "cheap," and easy for the lady to toss out.
By framing this tale in so small a space, Donne suggests a certain glum finality in the speaker's voice. There's a certain "well, that's that" quality to these three pithy stanzas: the speaker is resigning himself to a bad breakup. The unpredictable meter, however, also suggests that the speaker makes his way through these thoughts in lurching, bitter outbursts.
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Meter
Many of Donne's poems use surprising, prickly meters, and "A Jet Ring Sent" is no exception. While the poem is roughly iambic—that is, it's primarily built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "except"—the stanzas use lines of all different lengths and often mix up their feet for good measure.
In some moments, it would seem more accurate to describe the poem's meter as accentual (that is, measured by number of beats rather than by a predictable pattern of metrical feet). That's because the one thing that stays consistent across the poem is the number of beats per line:
- The first line of each stanza uses four beats, as in "Yet stay with me since thou art come."
- The second uses five beats, as in "Circle this finger's top, which didst her thumb."
- The third uses seven beats, as in "Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me."
- The fourth uses five beats again, as in "Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke."
Most of these lines mostly use iambs, as in the iambic pentameter (five iambs) of line 6:
Oh, why | should aught | less prec- | ious or | less tough,
But there are plenty of variations, starting from the poem's very first line:
Thou art | not so | black as | my heart,
The first three feet here are trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm, the opposite of iambs.
The unpredictability of this poem's rhythms helps to make the speaker's outrage and sorrow tangible. Even without scanning the meter, readers might notice that the first two stanzas—in which the speaker mourns the end of his relationship—feel especially jagged and rough. The final stanza—in which the speaker tells the jet ring it's lucky to be with him now instead of with the careless woman he first gave it to—falls into a calmer and more predictable rhythm. It's as if the speaker is settling into his bitterness, rather than struggling through the first throes of disappointment.
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Rhyme Scheme
"A Jet Ring Sent" uses a simple rhyme scheme of couplets, like so:
AABB
These neat rhymes chime with the speaker's tone. As he faces up to the end of his relationship with a lady who has "broke[n] her faith" with him, his crisp rhymes support a feeling of snipped-off finality.
The rhymes here might even hint at some bitter humor. The internal rhyme of "Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art," sounds almost bouncy, as if the speaker is laughing a dark, angry laugh as he denounces his faithless lady. For that matter, couplets, with their swiftly capped rhymes, can create a setup/punchline rhythm.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a brokenhearted lover coming to terms with the fact that his lady has left him. He finds a useful image for his feelings in the titular jet ring, a present he sent this lady that she has now returned to him, signaling that it's all over.
The speaker's response to the ring suggests that heartbreak hasn't blunted his wit. In all the ring's qualities—its circular shape, its blackness, its fragility—he finds images of his relationship with the woman who has left him. At last, he seems to take an odd comfort in keeping this ring as a token of what he had and lost. In his eyes, this ring is a reminder that, while his heart is now "black" with misery, the romance he shared with this woman was ultimately "cheap, and naught but fashion" to her—though it was "endless" to him.
While the speaker's pithy, bitter intelligence encourages readers to sympathize with him in his suffering, the poem might also raise certain questions about his own "faith" to this lady—to whom, after all, he sent this fashionable, brittle jet ring in the first place. For all readers know, something more "precious" and more "tough"—the gold of a "marriage ring"—might have been more to her taste, too.
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“A Jet Ring Sent” Setting
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There's no clear setting in "A Jet Ring Sent." Lovers have long exchanged rings to mark their devotion to each other, and jet jewelry has been popular for as long as people have been digging up rocks. However, readers might well imagine this poem taking place in the poet's own 17th-century English world. The implication that the lady once wore the ring on her thumb suggests as much: high 17th-century style! But more broadly, the exchange of rings (and the dramatic return of a ring) evokes a courtly Jacobean culture full of signs, symbols, and signals.
This speaker finds plenty of these in the ring he examines now. He reconsiders his gift, seeing it no longer as an image of eternal love (as he might have imagined because of the "endless" circle it forms) but of his beloved's "brittle" heart. As he observes, "marriage rings are not of this stuff": that is, wedding rings are made of precious materials like gold, not comparatively cheap jet.
Besides gold's symbolic significance as an image of worth and constancy (since gold doesn't tarnish), this line might remind readers that marriage, for people of Donne's time and place, was often a business transaction as much as a romantic union. (There was nothing businesslike about Donne's own marriage, though. See the Context section of this guide for more on Donne's romantic, impractical elopement.)
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Jet Ring Sent”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572–1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "Metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English poets who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral verse about love and God. (George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.)
Donne was the quintessential Metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences and a great writer of love poems that mingle sacred symbols with cheeky puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. (Many poets of Donne's time didn't widely publish their work, instead circulating it in manuscript among a few friends. See "The Triple Fool" for some of Donne's thoughts on the perils of poetic publication.)
Like the vast majority of Donne's poetry, "A Jet Ring Sent" didn't appear in print until several years after his death. It was first collected in the posthumous book Poems (1633).
Donne's mixture of wit, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. For instance, when Johnson (a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment) coined the term "Metaphysical poet," he did not mean it as a compliment. Johnson saw Donne and his contemporaries as irrational and obscure. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to A. S. Byatt.
Historical Context
In his youth, John Donne was a notorious ladies' man with plenty of experience both breaking hearts and having his heart broken. His sometimes foolhardy decision-making around women came to a head in an oddly touching way when he fell deeply in love with Anne More, an important official's daughter. Donne and Anne More eloped without getting More's family's permission. This romantic leap of faith backfired on Donne when his wife's angry father had him thrown in prison. Donne famously jotted down a little epigram about this personal disaster: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone." (The rhyme lets us know how the poet pronounced his name: DUNN, not DAWN.)
By the time Donne was released, reconciled with his father-in-law, and returned to polite society, he had to work his way into the favor of a new monarch: James I, who took the throne in 1603. The new king's court was worldly, intellectual, and superstitious all at once. James was pious in a rather paranoid way, anxious about demons and witches. Luckily for Donne, James was also a good judge of talent and a great patron of the arts and sciences; he respected Donne's poetry and valued his general brilliance.
However, James refused to accept Donne as a run-of-the-mill courtier. He was canny enough to see that Donne would make an outstanding clergyman. The reluctant Donne eventually had to bow to the king's will, and he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621. Just as James had predicted, Donne became a passionate and influential Anglican priest. Today Donne lies buried in the very cathedral where he once preached (or, rather, in the rebuilt version of it that arose after the Great Fire of London destroyed Old St. Paul's in 1666).
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More “A Jet Ring Sent” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Portrait of Donne — Admire a famous portrait of Donne in which he presents himself as a melancholy lover.
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short overview of Donne's life and work.
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A Celebration of Donne — Read an article on Donne by Katherine Rundell, the author of a recent Donne biography.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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