The speaker addresses love as if it were a person who has wrecked her. She says love has shorn her—stripped something essential away—and rifled through her heart, stealing or destroying what was there. The image of a shrine being torn down from the innermost part suggests that the most private, sacred place inside her has been violated. What rushes through that ruined space now is grief, and it is not quiet or controlled; it breaks out the way a sorrowing child cries. The tone is intimate and bitterly vulnerable. There is no distance or philosophy here, just raw feeling: someone who trusted love and was left hollowed out, exposed, and overtaken by sadness. The mood is one of desolation and helplessness, as if the speaker is standing in the aftermath of emotional ruin, unable to hide the hurt. That childlike plaint makes the grief feel immediate and unguarded.
Devastation — Summary
O love, you have shorn me, and rifled my heart, You have torn down the shrine from the innermost part. And through it now rushes a grief, sadly-wild, That breaks as the plaint of a sorrowing child.