The Triple Fool

The Triple Fool is John Donne's poem about a speaker who counts himself foolish for loving and then for expressing his grief in verse. He hopes that the discipline of poetry might contain the emotion, but another person's singing of the poem gives it fresh life. The compact argument turns on that reversal. Wit and self-mockery expose a difficulty of artistic expression: once feeling has become a work, its maker cannot entirely govern how it will be heard or what it will awaken.