It is nearly a year now.
It feels strange to be writing it. What _is_ one’s Heart? But it is a
plain fact of me.
I have not had a Broken Heart in the years before. I have had silly
fancies--I have wasted the outer tissues of my Heart, and it has been
bruised and battered. But nothing pierced deep enough to break it
till this.
My Broken Heart is the outstanding inner item of my life: and it
still is a very small thing even in my own reckoning. It tortures me
minutely all the minutes and moments and hours. And yet my all-round
life moves on beside it and often passes it on the road.
My Broken Heart contributes nothing, no cause and no urge, to the
writing of this song of my Soul and bones. It rather is a handicap.
It makes me sit and brood. It makes my eyelids heavy and my head
droop. It makes my shoulders ache. It makes me sit longish half-hours
with my head on my lonely hands. It fills me with foolish wasting
despair.
Its foolishness is the foremost thing about my Broken Heart. It is
not a foolishness of worldly reasons nor of outer causes but of
all the surprising folly of myself crowded into my Heart and into
that which Broke it. The foolishness would not be so noticeable
if the Brokenness were not so hideous and genuine and actual and
matter-of-course. It was foolish to lay myself open, who am humanly
starved, to the possible Breaking of my Heart: and doubly foolish
to let it be Broken. And being left in possession of a Broken Heart
I feel it to be a triply insanely foolish thing: but complete and
absolute and natural.