The Triple Fool

	I am two fools, I know,
	For loving, and for saying so
	In whining poetry;
	But where's that wiseman, that would not be I,
	If she would not deny?
	Then as th'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.
	Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
	For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

	But when I have done so,
	Some man, his art and voice to show,
	Doth set and sing my pain,
	And, by delighting many, frees again
	Grief, which verse did restrain.
	To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
	But not of such as pleases when 'tis read,
	Both are increased by such songs:
	For both their triumphs so are published,
	And I, which was two fools, do so grow three;
	Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
	(Smith, 81)

Like “Pyramus and Thisbe” this poem drives the lover's computation all the way to its poetic destiny in oxymoron—two oxymorons, to be exact:

---

“a little wise” and “best fools.” As a double oxymoron it works deepeningly: the one who remained a little wise (that is, who stopped short of poetry and wound up married) would be the best (or biggest) fool. The numbers game is evident enough as it piles up the lover's foolishnesses. But it reaches a self-reflexive peak in the line “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,” a line variously readable to mean “the woes of love are allayed when turned into poems” or “unhappiness shared among many is diminished in intensity.” (Paraphrase confirms, by contrast, the generous grace of a poem's parsimonies!) In fact, of course, the verse that attracts reciters tends to spread—rather than fetter—feeling, and Donne has hidden in the folds of the poem's apparent humbleness a secret self-love: he has written a poem so good the world won't be able to stop singing it back. It's not only the singer's modesty that's at issue here. To have allayed the pain, never to have turned it into poetry, to have won the beloved, and so been a “little wise” or the “best fool” (rather than the writerly kind), can, in retrospect, hardly be whole-heartedly desirable. The wish to share one's heart is, by this token, consanguineous with the wish to diminish it; and to give of one's heart, one has to break it. A sensitive reader will catch in Donne's fancy footwork the sorrow's underlying joke: while tallying up his fooldoms the poet-figure is also reminding us with what gifts of numbers (what numbers of gifts!) he outpaced the mixed condition of the oxymoron, or the marriage. The foolscap is a cover for poetic immortality.

There's another undercover delight to be had in this skeptic's sachet. Do a double-take at that penultimate line. Even as numbers are mentioned, they are also metrically encoded: as the poet's foolhoods multiply, his solitudes are reinscribed. Look at the line's first foot (“And I”). It appears, in the context of the poem's overall iambic pentameter, simply to be a regular iamb. But what follows can be said to tear away the regular stitch work of the iambic habit: two unstressed syllables (“which was”) themselves followed in turn by two stressed ones (“two fools”), and then, only a quick beat later, three stresses in a row (“so grow three”)—to my ear, a prominent derangement of the metrical expectation. Jonson once remarked that Donne, “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.” (Among the Talmudic tales and rabbinical lore is recorded a similarly horrifying judgment: that of the rabbi who declares that any scholar who looks up from his studies even for a moment—if only to admire a tree!—deserves to die!) But scholars may, at such times, miss the bewitchment that Herrick knows cannot inhere “when Art/ is too precise.”

---

For although the final line of “The Triple Fool” will return us to a reasonably regular iambic lope, it does so only after having alerted us to the possibilities of an extraordinary stress pattern: whenever a number is mentioned, it is also beaten out in code. The thought of three fools makes a mimicking molossos in the metric; the thought of two is spelled out too, in spondee. (If an iamb is a normal heartbeat, then a spondee is a heart in trouble—and a molossos is a cardiac emergency, a heart a beat or two away from fatal overstress. What rhythmical disfiguring could better fit this poem's amorous disconsolation?)

Best of all, when we work our way backward through the penultimate line to admire how the metrics underscore the meaning, we wind up considering the first metrical foot in a new light. For now it seems to contain, by token of its numerical code, the “one” that would inform its single stress: a one in the form of that first-person singular pronoun. The iamb “and I” contains a pronoun that, as we go backward, could only count down to loneliness and a conjunction that brings us back not to any “you” but only to the speaker's solitude. This one is ciphered, so to speak, as soon as deciphered.