The Full Text of “The Triple Fool”
1 I am two fools, I know,
2For loving, and for saying so
3 In whining poetry;
4But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
5 If she would not deny?
6Then, as the earth's inward, narrow, crooked lanes
7Do purge sea-water's fretful salt away,
8 I thought, if I could draw my pains
9Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay:
10Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce;
11For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
12 But when I have done so,
13Some man, his art and voice to show,
14 Doth set and sing my pain,
15And, by delighting many, frees again
16 Grief, which verse did restrain.
17To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
18But not of such as pleases when 'tis read;
19 Both are increasèd by such songs:
20For both their triumphs so are publishèd,
21And I, which was two fools, do so grow three;
22Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
The Full Text of “The Triple Fool”
1 I am two fools, I know,
2For loving, and for saying so
3 In whining poetry;
4But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
5 If she would not deny?
6Then, as the earth's inward, narrow, crooked lanes
7Do purge sea-water's fretful salt away,
8 I thought, if I could draw my pains
9Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay:
10Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce;
11For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
12 But when I have done so,
13Some man, his art and voice to show,
14 Doth set and sing my pain,
15And, by delighting many, frees again
16 Grief, which verse did restrain.
17To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
18But not of such as pleases when 'tis read;
19 Both are increasèd by such songs:
20For both their triumphs so are publishèd,
21And I, which was two fools, do so grow three;
22Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
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“The Triple Fool” Introduction
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"The Triple Fool" is the 17th-century English poet John Donne's witty, rueful reflection on the power—and the limits—of poetry. Heartbroken by unrequited love, the poem's speaker tries to alleviate his suffering by writing a poem about his grief. For a moment, he thinks he's managed to trap his pain in verse. Then he's knocked flat when "some man" sets his poem to music, and he's forced to feel all his heartbreak afresh through the power of the song. Art might "purge" and contain a painful feeling, this speaker concludes, but it can also just give that feeling more power—and "love and grief" will always have the last word. This poem was first published in 1633, two years after Donne's death.
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“The Triple Fool” Summary
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I'm two kinds of foolish, I'm aware: I'm foolish for falling in love, and I'm foolish for writing whiny poetry about my love. But what smart man wouldn't want to be a fool like me—if only the lady I loved loved me back? In the same way that the winding tunnels inside the earth draw the salt out of ocean water and make it fresh, I thought I could take the sting out of my own heartbreak by forcing it through the difficult twists and turns of poetry. If you can shape your grief into metered verse, it can't be so painful; the man who chains his feelings up in poetry masters his suffering.
But now that I've written a poem, some guy, wanting to show off his musical skill, puts my agonized words to music and sings them. Even as he gives other people pleasure through this song, he releases the heartbreak that I thought I had trapped in the poem. Poetry is the appropriate way to commemorate both love and grief—but it's not wise to put those feelings into poems that people read and like! Both love and grief get stronger when one writes a well-liked poem because such poems spread and trigger exactly the feelings the poem was meant to control—and thus declare those feelings' ultimate victory. So I—who was already two kinds of foolish—become a third kind of foolish (by sharing my love poetry and thus releasing my painful feelings to the wild, where they can come back and bite me). It's the people who have some smarts who wind up being the biggest fools.
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“The Triple Fool” Themes
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The Danger of Making Art About Heartbreak
In terrible pain over unrequited love, the speaker of “The Triple Fool” has an idea: he’ll take the sting out of his feelings by turning them into a poem, “tam[ing]” them by forcing them to fit into an orderly shape. But the joke’s on him: someone sets his poem to music, and when the speaker hears this song, it releases all his agonized feelings.
The process of creating art, the poem suggests, can momentarily soothe, transform, and capture strong feeling—but the art itself ultimately isn’t under its creator’s control. And, ironically, the danger of turning heartbreak into art is that powerful, emotional artwork may spark the very emotions it was supposed to defeat.
At first, the speaker thinks that art has the power to tame overwhelming feelings by forcing them into some kind of order. The speaker imagines “tam[ing]” his “grief” over his unrequited love by forcing it into “rhyme” and “numbers” (or metered poetry), bending it to his artistic will. Doing so, the speaker believes, will “purge” his pains, allowing him to contain, control, and weaken his feelings even as he expresses them. Art, then, is meant to be able to transform pain into beauty—and to “fetter[]” it, chaining it to the page.
But when the speaker “fool[ishly]” shares his grief-stricken poem, it develops a life of its own: it’s so moving that “some man” sets it to music, “delighting many” with its beauty. And when the speaker hears the song, it brings all of his agony freshly to life again. There’s an irony here: by capturing his feelings on paper, the speaker has actually embodied them in a form that can travel, spread, and come back to bite him! Far from conquering feelings, art does just the opposite, releasing exactly the emotions the speaker sought to neutralize and contain.
Art, in other words, doesn’t simply “capture” feelings: in giving them a body, it also gives them wings. The speaker’s ability to put his heartbreak into compelling words, and his decision to release those words into the world, in the end makes him the greatest possible “fool”: in trying to master his feelings, he’s only given them an independent (and powerful) existence in a work of art. But perhaps he feels some consoling pride about this, too: he may be three different kinds of fool, but at least he’s a “triple fool” whose work “pleases when ‘tis read.”
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Triple Fool”
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Lines 1-3
I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry;"The Triple Fool" begins with a few brusque, self-deprecating lines. The speaker starts things off as if he's trying to preempt criticism: you don't have to tell him that he's a fool—he'll say so himself!
In fact, he's two kinds of fool at once: he's a fool for "loving," and a fool for writing "whining poetry" about his love. Already, then, the reader gets the sense that love has not treated this speaker especially well. And in his own eyes, he should have known better than to fall in love in the first place.
What's more, art seems to be treating him poorly. The speaker suggests that there's something pathetic about his love poems: they're just "whining," just self-pitying cries of pain. But, as the rest of this poem will reveal, the folly of writing love poems isn't just that one might write a bad one. It's that good poetry is dangerous—especially good poetry about suffering! As this speaker tries to blunt the agony of unrequited love through verse, he'll discover that art doesn't just transform or trap pain: it evokes and releases it, too.
These first lines express deep sadness, concealed in a defensive cynicism. Criticizing his own foolishness and his "whining poetry," the speaker seems to see himself as uncomfortably similar to a figure like Duke Orsino in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, a self-pitying lover wrapped up in his own grief. Making fun of yearning, melodramatic lovers was as popular a hobby in the 17th century as it is now, and in proclaiming his own folly, the speaker seems to be mocking himself before anyone else can get there. And that suggests that he's trying to shield himself from even more suffering. He's frustrated with himself, but he's also in a lot of genuine pain.
Listen to the way the poem's first short, sharp line evokes his frustration:
I am two fools, I know,
Every word in this brisk line of iambic trimeter (that is, a line of three iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm) is a clipped monosyllable—and the assonant /oo/ of "two fools" lays special emphasis on this hyperbolic declaration.
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Lines 4-5
But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
If she would not deny? -
Lines 6-9
Then, as the earth's inward, narrow, crooked lanes
Do purge sea-water's fretful salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my pains
Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay: -
Lines 10-11
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce;
For he tames it, that fetters it in verse. -
Lines 12-14
But when I have done so,
Some man, his art and voice to show,
Doth set and sing my pain, -
Lines 15-16
And, by delighting many, frees again
Grief, which verse did restrain. -
Lines 17-20
To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
But not of such as pleases when 'tis read;
Both are increasèd by such songs:
For both their triumphs so are publishèd, -
Lines 21-22
And I, which was two fools, do so grow three;
Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
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“The Triple Fool” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
When the speaker of "The Triple Fool" personifies his "grief," he makes it seem like an independent force with its own mysterious intentions.
The speaker's relationship with his grief is not a friendly one. In the first stanza of the poem, his whole plan is to imprison his grief in a poem—to chain it up in the metaphorical "fetters" of "verse." But grief is too wily for him: no sooner has he imprisoned it than it escapes again, freed when its poem-jail becomes a song.
By presenting his grief as a person—and a "fierce" person at that, one whom no jail can hold!—the speaker thus gives readers a sense of how thoroughly at its mercy he feels. Grief isn't just a substance to be manipulated or a passing mood. It's a powerful and cunning enemy that can spring out and "triumph[]" over the speaker when he least expects it. There's a strong sense here that grief is winning, defeating the speaker no matter how hard he fights.
In the second stanza, grief also has a traveling companion: "love." While love isn't as clearly personified as grief is here, it shares in grief's "triumph[]" over the speaker. These two emotions, it seems, walk hand in hand, and they're as powerful as they are merciless.
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Imagery
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Rhetorical Question
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Sibilance
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Assonance
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"The Triple Fool" 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.
- Deny
- The earth's inward, narrow, crooked lanes
- Fretful
- Vexation
- Allay
- Numbers
- Fetters
- Art and voice
- Doth
- Set and sing
- 'Tis
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Refuse to return the speaker's love.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Triple Fool”
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Form
John Donne invents his own form for "The Triple Fool." The poem is built from two 11-line stanzas (unusual in English-language poetry) with a fluid, varied meter. Those stanzas mirror each other, using the same rhyme scheme and rhythms.
This form reflects both the speaker's skill and his frustration—and through them, the poem's ideas about poetry and power. Part of this speaker's problem is that he's just too good a poet. His ability to put his feelings into elegant verse backfires on him when his latest poem of longing and grief gets so popular it's turned into a song. Forced to confront his own words in the form of emotionally overpowering music, the speaker is no longer able to believe that he has successfully "fetter[ed]" his feelings in his poetry.
This poem—with its stop-and-start meter and its off-kilter 11-line stanzas—might thus seem like an effort to evade the musicians: this poem isn't straightforwardly "harmonious" or rhythmic in a way that lends itself to songwriting. But in its very weirdness, this form is also tightly controlled, and it shows the speaker mastering poetry even as he writes about how his poetry mastered him.
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Meter
"The Triple Fool" uses a varied meter. While the poem is mostly iambic—that is, it's built from iambs, metrical feet with an unstressed-stressed, da-DUM rhythm—it ranges from trimeter (three iambs in a row) to pentameter (five iambs in a row). Broad metrical patterns repeat across the poem: in both stanzas, lines of trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter fall in the same places.
These patterns of longer and shorter lines help the speaker subtly alter the poem's tension and mood. For instance, when the poem begins with a trimetric "I am | two fools, | I know," the reader already gets the sense that the speaker is feeling pretty fed up: this short line of monosyllabic words feels abrupt and even rude. The flowing pentameter of lines 6-7, meanwhile, has a very different mood, suggesting that the speaker is getting wistfully caught up in his own imagery as he recalls his hopes that poetry might "purge" his pain.
Within these patterns, the speaker does a lot of fancy footwork. Both stanzas, for example, close with a couplet of iambic pentameter—or at least, couplets based on iambic pentameter. But take a look at how wild the patterns of stresses get at the end of the first stanza, in lines 10-11:
Grief brought | to num- | bers can- | not be | so fierce;
For he | tames it, | that fet- | ters it | in verse.The speaker introduces these lines with a trochee (a foot with a stressed-unstressed, DUM-da rhythm). While that's a little irregular, it's a fairly common technique in iambic-pentameter poetry. But in line 11, the trochee that appears in the second foot ("tames it") is a lot more unusual. That trochee forces two stressed words—"he" and "tames"—to collide with each other, breaking up the meter's comfortable flow.
And that's all part of the speaker's point! No matter what the speaker claims, the "verse" here doesn't feel "tame[d]" or orderly at all: that tricky rhythm makes it feel as if the poem might be about to buck the speaker right off.
The speaker's metrical variations thus subtly reflect exactly what this poem is about. Try all you like to "fetter[]" your feelings with poetry, the speaker suggests, but don't get too comfortable: poetry itself isn't as orderly, "tame[]," or tractable as you might expect.
(The double irony here, of course, is that the speaker is completely in control of these wild rhythms: he's creating this effect on purpose!)
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Rhyme Scheme
The complex, subtle rhyme scheme of "The Triple Fool" runs like this:
AABBBCDCDEE
There's something a little off-kilter about this rhyme scheme. While each stanza begins and ends with a solid, balanced couplet, the lines in the middle feel wilder, following a striking triplet with a more leisurely, back-and-forth CDCD pattern. These changing rhymes reflect the speaker's changing moods: as he moves from the brusque exasperation of "I am two fools, I know" into strange images of the depths of the earth, his rhymes also move from insistent matching into hypnotic alternations.
The different moods of those patterns also support the poem's varied meter. The harmonious CDCD lines, for instance, are all in iambic pentameter—and feel more reflective and philosophical, less immediate, than the short, unpredictable lines around them.
To a modern reader, a number of the rhymes here sound slant: "poetry" and "I," or "fierce" and "verse," for instance. Some of these distinctions wouldn't have felt as sharp in Donne's 17th-century London accent. But these subtle mismatches do fit right in with the way this poem often plays with irregularity: even as the speaker vainly hopes to "fetter[]" his feelings in rhyme, his rhymes aren't even that tightly "fetter[ed]" to each other!
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“The Triple Fool” Speaker
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A wit, a lover, a philosopher, and a poet, the speaker of "The Triple Fool" seems an awful lot like John Donne himself. This poem's simultaneous cynicism and sincerity is classic Donne: Donne's poems often unite a deep skepticism about love and art with intense, passionate feeling.
But the reader doesn't absolutely have to interpret this speaker as Donne. The speaker could be a voice for any suffering poet who has tried to relieve their feelings in verse—and then found that poems have ideas and lives beyond their writers' intentions.
What separates this speaker from a lot of other lovelorn writers is his focus, not so much on love, but on love poetry. Here, the speaker's attempt to "fetter[]" his heartbreak by putting it into verse turns into a philosophical reflection on the relationship between feeling and art. This self-deprecating, rueful, heartbroken speaker at least has his own alert mind to keep him company.
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“The Triple Fool” Setting
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While there's no particular setting in this poem, its ideas and events suggest that it's taking place in Donne's own Jacobean London. The speaker's ideas about what poetry and music might be for—and how they might work on people's feelings—are grounded in 16th- and 17th-century thought. (Just for instance, see the very first lines of Twelfth Night for a famous speech on the relationship of music to love.)
The action of this poem, in which a musician sets the speaker's words to music, also fits into Donne's literary world. During Donne's lifetime, poets (who were mostly from the educated upper and middle classes) often only shared their work with a close circle of friends; wider publication was often seen as rather vulgar, and Donne's own works didn't appear in print until after his death.
But even so, poetry could develop a life of its own. It wouldn't have been uncommon for "some man" or another to make a song out of a manuscript that was doing the rounds.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Triple Fool”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572-1631) was an intense and complex poetic personality: he wrote witty, cerebral poems about love and passionate, sexual poems about God. Known for his elaborate conceits, he's considered one of the most important of the metaphysical poets, a group of 17th-century writers including George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne. These poets didn't see themselves as a movement at the time; it's only in retrospect that they've been grouped together as writers of intricate, ingenious, and sometimes mystical verse.
While Donne is now remembered primarily as a poet, he mostly worked as a clergyman, becoming the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. He didn't publish any of his poetry during his lifetime; in 17th-century literary circles, publication in print was often seen as a bit vulgar, as it opened one's work up to anyone who had money to buy a book. (And the regret the speaker of "The Triple Fool" feels over having shared his own verse suggests that publication also makes poets vulnerable to emotional danger!) Instead, Donne shared his handwritten manuscripts among his friends. "The Triple Fool" didn't appear in print until 1633, two years after Donne's death.
Donne and the other metaphysical poets fell out of favor after their deaths. Even the term "metaphysical poets" comes from Samuel Johnson's disapproving and dismissive summation of Donne and his contemporaries. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Coleridge rediscovered Donne's work, and by the time Modernism rolled around in the 20th century, Donne's reputation had been fully revived. Writers like T.S. Eliot and Yeats considered Donne a major influence.
Historical Context
John Donne lived and wrote during a time of intense change. He was born at the end of an era, growing up during the last years of Elizabeth I's reign. After a rocky start, Elizabeth stabilized an England still thrown into turmoil by religious schism: her father Henry VIII's decision to split from the Pope and found his own national Church of England led to generations of conflict and bloodshed between English Protestants and Catholic loyalists. Elizabeth's political skill, her dramatic military victories against the Spanish, and her canny decision to present herself as an almost supernatural, Artemis-like "Virgin Queen" all helped to create a new sense of English national identity in the midst of chaos.
The ambitious Donne first gained a political foothold as a courtier in Elizabeth's service, but he was ignominiously thrown into prison when he eloped with Anne More, the daughter of an important official. By the time he was released, reconciled with his father-in-law, and returned to polite society, he had to work his way into the favor of a whole new monarch: James I, who took the throne in 1603.
James's court was worldly, intellectual, and superstitious all at once. James was a patron of the arts and sciences, but also pious in a rather paranoid way, anxious about demons and witches. Luckily for Donne, James was impressed with his poetry. But James was also convinced that Donne would make an outstanding clergyman, and refused to accept him as a run-of-the-mill courtier, instead insisting that he become a priest. James finally made Donne Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London—an important post that Donne was hesitant to accept at first. But as James had predicted, Donne became a passionate and influential Anglican preacher.
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More “The Triple Fool” Resources
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External Resources
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A Celebration of Donne — Watch a celebration of Donne (during which, appropriately enough, some of his poems are set to music) from St. Paul's Cathedral in London, of which Donne was a famous Dean.
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A Donne Rediscovery — Read about a recently rediscovered volume of Donne's poetry, written by hand—and learn about why he didn't want his poetry widely published during his lifetime!
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Poems (1633) — Learn more about John Donne's book Poems, the collection in which "The Triple Fool" was first posthumously published.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to actor Richard Burton reading the poem aloud.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about John Donne's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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