The Death of Love (allegory)
The poem personifies Love to create an allegory about the end of a romantic relationship. The speaker imagines Love as a person who has died; now, others view his corpse and mourn his death. The fact that the poem speaks of love as an entity conveys the intensity of the feeling, the intensity of the pain the main character has to endure. Love is a stand-in for the end of the relationship: the thing that once existed between two people is now also dead and awaiting burial. While Love awaits his burial, though, the speaker begins to note Love's funeral shroud of shame and his hypocritical will, realizing that the love he shared with his mistress was not perfect either. Ultimately, imagining Love as a dead body helps the speaker to realize that Love is in fact not dead: his mistress will find it again, although perhaps with another person. The same, presumably, is true for him.
Funeral Rites (motif)
Playing into the allegory of the Death of Love is a motif of funeral arrangements. The speaker references a number of funeral rites: ringing bells, playing dirges (songs of mourning), reading tentrals (the catholic mass for the dead), wrapping a body in a funeral shroud, and preparing to hear the deceased's will from an executor. This motif of death creates an air of doom that is perhaps serious, perhaps hyperbolic and even humorous.
The Tomb (symbol)
The speaker describes death's tomb in detail, symbolizing the death of his mistress' love. Rather than a human-sized tomb, this tomb is the mistress's "Marble Heart" (her cold, stone heart). It is inscribed with the name "Sir Wrong," showing that the mistress has killed the speaker by rejecting him. The epitaph, "Her eyes were once his dart," is harder to interpret, but suggests that her eyes pierced his heart and hurt him.
Marble Heart (symbol)
The mistress' so-called "marble heart" is a symbol for her indifference towards the speaker and her lack of human feeling.
Beseeching God (motif)
The speaker cries out to God four times, "Good Lord, deliver us!" This repeated line represents the speaker begging God for mercy in the face of pain. This serves to underscore his desperation and frustration. However, it might also be exaggerated, mock-frustration.
