"The Apparition" begins with a bang. The speaker, a scorned lover, confronts the woman who rejected him, abruptly telling her she's nothing better than a "murd'ress," a female murderer. Any moment now, the speaker assures her, he'll die of a broken heart.
That idea might feel more than a little hyperbolic. No matter how much heartbroken lovers claim they're about to keel right over, it doesn't happen all that often. As a wise woman once said, "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love." Rather than suggesting that this speaker is at death's door, this declaration merely shows that he's in a real state, all worked up about being rejected.
His bitterness and fury come through in the next lines, too. When he's dead, he says, his beloved will believe that she's "free / From all solicitation from me." In other words, she'll feel safe from any more of the speaker's advances. The speaker's petulant tone implies that he's thinking something along the lines of: And you'll LIKE that, won't you?
However, there's a key word here: if the beloved dares "think'st" (that is, think) she'll be free of the speaker after he's dead, she thinks wrong. The beloved will only think the speaker is out of her hair. He, however, has other posthumous plans—plans which he'll unfold at length over the course of this vengeful poem.
A number of clues here suggest the speaker himself isn't thinking totally clearly. Notice the jolting meter, for instance:
- The poem starts out in iambic pentameter. That means this is a line of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm: "When by | thy scorn, | O murd'- | ress, I | am dead." So far, so familiar.
- The second line, though, gets abruptly shorter, shrinking down to just three iambs (iambic trimeter, that is): "And that | thou think'st | thee free."
- The fourth line swings right back to pentameter again—or does if you read it as the 17th-century John Donne would have pronounced it, with six (!) full syllables in the word "solicitation": "From all | soli- | cita- | tion | from me"
Similar unpredictable metrical lurches will appear all through the poem. The rhyme scheme isn't any more reliable: there's plenty of rhyme here, but it never resolves into a single steady pattern.
All these strange sounds suggest that the speaker is losing it a little in the wake of romantic rejection. The next lines will reveal just how frantic he's become.