The Computation, John Donne

In John Donne’s The Computation, he talks about how his life has been ever since the person that he loved went away or perished. This poem can be taken in so many different ways, and another reader can take if he himself died and is looking back on his life. For this assignment, however, I will focus on my first interpretation, which is that the speaker is lamenting the departure of his lover. Donne uses end rhyme in order to create a tone for the reader to follow and be able to hear as they read the poem. This poem is also all two sentences, although there are ten lines, they are all connected with commas and semicolons. There is one period in the poem, but it ends as an overall question. Donne’s overall message in his poem, is how his life suddenly became longer and harder to deal with than when his lover was still around.
I thought that this poem had many comparisons to Paul Verlaine’s tear Fall in My Heart simply because both poems seem to be describing a pain that they have felt once something unexpected happened to their loved one. These poems, however, differ in the speaker’s situation. For example, in Verlaine’s poem, the speaker is not sure what it is that is making his heart be in so much pain. In Donne’s poem, the speaker knows why he is in so much pain, and why his life and days never seem to end. He has lost his loved one, and with that loss every single day seems like a century. Although Verlaine’s poem is much longer than Donne’s, they both use relatively short lines in order to convey their message. By using this technique they are excellently portraying the economy of words and language that exists in poetry. They take into consideration that poetry is different than writing an essay, and so, when they choose words and write their poems, they are carefully choosing which words to use or not use. These two poems are also different from what we are used to reading when talking about love. Readers mostly expect to find everything cheery and nice in love poems, but the reality is, that there are those who do get hurt by their significant other, and these two poets do an excellent job conveying their feelings.