Meaning & Analysis
Both love and pease pottage (a simple, hearty food) are forces that cannot be easily resisted; they each have a powerful and inevitable effect—on the heart and the belly respectively.
Insights
Inevitability of Natural Impulses
Love and hunger are two elemental drives—emotional and physical—that override social constraints and will assert themselves regardless of obstacles or intentions.
The Dual Nature of Human Need
The proverb aligns romantic and bodily needs, showing that both the longing of the heart and the craving of the stomach are relentless and will ‘make their way’ through any resistance.
Destructive Consequences of Passion and Appetite
By pointing to the heartbroken lover and the bellyache from pease porridge, the saying wittily suggests that powerful desires can bring suffering as well as fulfillment.
Folkloric Body-Mind Parallel
This folk proverb humorously acknowledges that both love and food—often seen as primal drives—can overwhelm reason and self-control, reinforcing a traditional view of the human body as a site of vulnerability.
Satire of Sentimentality
The blunt juxtaposition of love with pease pottage undercuts the idealization of romantic emotion, aligning it with a mundane—and sometimes indelicate—bodily urge, reflecting early modern skepticism of passion.
Proverbial Humor and Earthiness
Like many rustic proverbs, it mixes the sacred (love) and the profane (flatulence, indigestion) to express deep truths in comic or grounded ways—a technique with long roots in English oral tradition.
Persistence of Simple Forces
Whether in courtship or digestion, the proverb insists that simple, natural forces—love and food—are not to be underestimated; they act with determination and effect.
Rhetorical Devices
Parallelism
Structurally aligns love and pease pottage, emphasizing their shared capacity to overcome obstacles through parallel phrasing.
Irony
There's an implicit humor in equating a noble emotion with a humble dish, highlighting the gap between romantic idealism and bodily realism.
Personification
Both love and pease pottage are anthropomorphized—they 'make their way' like determined agents—enhancing the proverb’s memorability and wit.
Transcription
Quotations
*One breaks the heart, the other the belly.
*Because one breaks the belly, the other the heart.
You know the old proverb, that sad are the effects of Love and Pease Porridge.
Love, and raw Pease, are two ill Things, the one breaks the Heart, and the other brusts the Belly.
(Pease-porridge).
They say love and pease porridge are two dangerous things; one breaks the heart; and the other the belly.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.