The speaker of John Donne's poem "Love's Diet" distances himself from his current relationship as his attitude toward love shifts from inconvenient to indifference with intermediate stages of defensive attacks. The speaker Donne presents does not have complete control over his emotions and even shows subtle signs of fear when faced with emotions like rejection. The lack of control, however, leads to feelings of annoyance, because the speaker has become so absorbed in love that he or she no longer has the ability to concentrate on other activities. The speaker then begins to distance himself from his lover by metaphorically putting his love on a diet in order to achieve a state of indifference towards love and avoid the pain of rejection from an unfaithful mistress.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayGiving no indication of the reason for his romantic annoyance, the speaker nevertheless clearly establishes his emotions. In the opening lines of the poem, he uses wordy language to describe love as "a cumbersome heaviness / And a heavy corpulence" (Donne 104, 1-2) to indicate that the relationship has become troublesome for him. In the following lines, the speaker sees the need to diminish his love "and to keep it in proportion" (Donne 104, 4), suggesting that corpulent love so consumes the speaker that he cannot carry out any other activities. With four basic lines of information, the speaker then introduces the metaphor of his love's diet. The use of this metaphor works effectively for the speaker because, as the personified version of excessive love physically diminishes with diet, the speaker achieves greater emotional distance from his lover and approaches a state of indifference. by limiting his own reactions to love and refusing to accept his mistress's signs of affection. The second, third, and fourth stanzas of "Love's Diet" all follow an established pattern that shows the speaker struggling to keep his love on a diet in the first three lines of the stanza before making sure his mistress doesn't actually show him of favor. him alone. In the second stanza, the speaker proclaims that he does not allow his love to utter more than one sigh a day (Donne 104, 7). Although love is still present, the speaker begins to exert more control over love, especially when interacting with the mistress. When the mistress sighs and love goes against the regime to delight in her demonstrations, the speaker “lets her see / 'It was neither very healthy nor made for me'” (Donne 104, 11 -12). The speaker, having already found a way to reduce his emotions, must confront those of his lady. He convinces himself that her sigh, which previously would have been nourishment for love, was not even addressed to him. The speaker distances himself from traditional activities associated with love as the pattern of denial continues in the third and fourth stanzas. The speaker states that if love provoked tears, it “brought [the tear] to him in such a way / With contempt and shame, that it did not nourish him” (Donne 104, 13-14). Excessively salty tears would keep love on a strict diet, even though the attitude toward love shows the speaker becoming pompous in his method of distancing himself from the relationship. The speaker also asserts his control over love by maintaining an attitude of contempt toward his wife's actions. When she cries, the speaker attacks her fidelity because her “eyes which roll towards all, do not weep, but perspire” (Donne 104, 18). The strike against her lover's fidelity is a new element in the poem.In the second stanza the speaker makes no mention of the person to whom the sighs were directed, but here the speaker includes another collective group of men with whom his lady presumably also has relations. The speaker includes an element of defensiveness in his attempts to distance himself from love. The speaker's defensive measures extend into the fourth stanza. According to the parameters of the speaker's model, he begins by boldly asserting that he burned the letters that love made him write (Donne 104, 20). Although he prevented contact by burning the letters, it was still the speaker who wrote them in the first place. Even in earlier stanzas, the speaker has continued to perform the actions associated with love despite his claims that his love is on a diet. The speaker also continued to scrutinize his lady's responses to the original intention of distancing himself from her. The defensive measures he employs as he denies his mistress's affections culminate in the question he asks at the end of the fourth stanza: "what good is it / To be the fortieth name in a heap (Give 105, 23-24)? According to the speaker, her lover writes to many people, and among them he is at the bottom of the list. The reference to "an entail" refers to the process of inheriting land, which the speaker uses in the poem as the non-existent chance he has to be with his lady because her name is fortieth on the list . The question, while not an outright attack as discussed above, echoes the lover's infidelity and the speaker's attempts to distance himself. Although the speaker attempts to distance himself from his relationship, he still pays great attention to his mistress throughout the poem. He describes love as a burden (Donne 104, 1) but monitors his lady's sighs, tears and letters for three stanzas. The interaction continues despite the debate over her fidelity because the speaker refuses to actually end the relationship. The concept of dieting implies that the speaker is content to distance himself but has no intention of going away because dieting is not supposed to lead to death. The speaker cannot destroy his emotions, but in the fourth stanza's question, his defensive measures of attack shift toward the realization that too much care is of no use to him (Donne 104, 23-24). The answer to his question lies in adopting an attitude of indifference. Although the speaker has proven in previous stanzas that he cannot effectively end the relationship because he is still careful about his mistress; despite his claims that love bothers him, the speaker develops an attitude of indifference. The speaker opens the last stanza with a metaphor of bird watching. He states: “Thus I have reclaimed my buzzard love to fly / To what, when, how and where I choose” (Donne 105, 25-26). His love, once incapable of direction and precision, now resembles the tamed hawk that hunts with careful observation. The speaker, however, claims to be like the owner of the falcon who can perform acts of love as a hunter would behave during a hunt. Love, which once bothered the speaker, no longer consumes him or prevents him from other activities because the speaker says he can "give birth to a mistress, swear, write, sigh and cry: / And the game is killed, or lost, go talk and sleep” (Donne 105, 29-30). Whether or not the speaker succeeds in acquiring a mistress makes no difference to him because he has reached the point where love is an isolated activity that has no bearing on the rest of his life. The bird-watching metaphor allows the speaker to move from a person always controlled by love, 2007. 104-5.