Medicine and sentiment collide in the title. "Heart, attacked" could be a hospital diagnosis, but the comma and the clipped participle make it sound more like a report of an assault. The poem delivers on the second meaning. Across its middle stanzas the speaker turns on the organ we usually treat as the home of feeling and strips away its credentials one by one. It "cannot be a friend / or take delight," and it "will not reason but only perform / and look like meat." The central idea is that the heart is a body part, not a companion, so if love exists it must live somewhere else. The final image puts it in a place so humble it is almost comic: "the tongue / of a dying shoe."
The opening couplet already does odd things with knowledge. "A great jar of blood / heard of the heart" sounds like a definition, but "heard" and "heart" differ by a single letter, so the line hears itself as it speaks. The sound suggests that we know the heart only by report, as a thump in the chest or a word in songs, and have never really met it. The "jar" shrinks the heart to a container, something from a laboratory shelf or a pantry, and the word "great" sits on it with a faint irony. The second stanza deepens the doubt with "when we have one." Having a heart is treated as something still to come, like a purchase, and the next word, "advantage," keeps that cold, commercial tone. The speaker is weighing whether the heart is worth owning.
The vocabulary of the attack is deliberately flat. The speaker says "cannot" and "will not," the language of a verdict. "Perform" is the most interesting verb. It describes what an organ does, beating on cue, but it also carries a hint of theatre, of acting out emotion without feeling it. Then comes "meat," the bluntest word in the poem, which strips the heart of both poetry and dignity. The speaker explains where this thought comes from: "or so I think at a funeral." That small phrase matters. In front of a body, the idea of the heart as the seat of the soul becomes hard to hold, and the speaker's bleakness reads less as cynicism than as a reaction to grief.
The form supports this restraint. The poem is twelve lines of free verse in six couplets, with no end rhyme, no capitals and no punctuation beyond the comma in the title. Without punctuation the lines move like quiet thinking, and the short couplets keep the thoughts apart like items in an inventory. Rhythm is spoken and uneven rather than metrical, with short, heavy phrases such as "look like meat" landing like a thud. Sound ties things together quietly instead of through rhyme: the long vowels of "jar" and "heart," and the repeated "l" and "v" in "love lives," which keep the end of the poem soft after so much hard talk.
The ending is where the poem opens up. "How love lives" can be read as the object of the speaker's thinking at the funeral, or as a statement that hangs open. The sentence runs across the stanza break, so "lives" is left on its own for a moment before the poem drops into "in the tongue / of a dying shoe." The image is surprising and exact. A shoe's tongue is a flap that cannot speak, so the poem sets a mute, worn-out tongue against the heart's failed promise of feeling. A "dying" shoe is old and scuffed, and the poem does not say whose it is. Judging by the funeral setting, it might belong to the dead person or to a mourner, but either way love is found in an ordinary object that has been walked in and gone to the same places as its owner.
The poem is significant because it declines the easy comfort of the Valentine heart while still insisting that love is real. It moves from skepticism to tenderness in just a few words. In its final image, love is not an organ's mysterious power but something that lives in the worn things around us, humble and almost shabby.