"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.