Heartbreak
This poem is primarily about the pain of heartbreak and lost love. It is interested in two primary aspects of this experience: the fact that it is common and the fact that it is interpersonal. In terms of the first, the poem questions whether the fact that an experience is frequent or inevitable lessens its impact. The speaker argues that fading love is a natural occurrence in the world, and yet, despite its normalcy, she clearly experiences it as an extraordinarily difficult event. The commonness of heartbreak does not reduce how much it hurts the speaker. In terms of the second aspect, the speaker tries hard to distinguish her own emotional response to heartbreak from her lover's role in creating that heartbreak. She suggests that, to a great extent, her own feelings have very little to do with her lover's actions. In this regard, she has more success, and seems truly not to feel anger towards the source of her heartbreak. However, she turns her anger inward, feeling frustrated with her own emotions.
Rationality and Emotion
Tied to the issue of heartbreak is the issue of rationality and rationalization. The speaker's attempt to reframe heartbreak as an unremarkable and therefore harmless event is, in essence, an attempt to rationalize away her feelings. Her rationalization fails for a number of reasons. Despite knowing that heartbreak occurs often and that her situation is normal, she still feels deeply distressed. Moreover, because she has tried hard to rationalize her feelings and because she apparently attaches importance to the quality of being rational, her remaining emotion causes her further distress. Indeed, she asks for pity, not because of her heartbreak, but because of the internal conflict that arises following her failure to fully rationalize her emotions. Moreover, her attempts to rationalize her feelings by comparing her situation to nature actually backfires, causing her to perceive nature more harshly and to describe elements of nature more negatively.
Transience
The speaker claims that love is as ephemeral as any other event in nature, comparing its impermanence to that of the ocean's tides or the moon's phases. An interesting aspect of her comparison is the cyclical element of each natural event she describes. The events at hand are not unpredictable in their impermanence. Instead, their change is rooted in highly predictable patterns. Therefore, the speaker argues that love's impermanence is not merely unavoidable, but predictable, making any surprise in the face of heartbreak unjustified. The speaker also wishes for her own feelings to display a similar impermanence, hoping to spur herself towards recovery from heartbreak, but finding that her emotions are slower and less predictably cyclical than the processes of nature.
Gender
The poem's exploration of gender is a subtle one, developing mostly in the seventh line. There, the speaker groups her ex-lover in with a broader category of men, arguing that "a man’s desire is hushed so soon." The speaker's gender is slightly ambiguous, but the phrasing of line seven, in which male desire is portrayed from an almost anthropological distance, suggests that the speaker is female. She extends to herself both more agency and less patience than she extends to her male lover. Whereas his feelings are described as almost outside his control, making him freer of responsibility, the speaker views her own feelings as a site of her own personal responsibility. She feels that she does, or should, have the agency to control her feelings and therefore experiences distress when she is unable to exercise such control. Therefore, for the speaker, men's feelings and women's feelings are fundamentally different, making issues of control, agency, and blame variable depending on gender.
