Is this line in a song/poem grammatically correct: "But oh how the love, it still wrecks me every time."?
Is this line in a song (or might just end up as a poem) grammatically correct: "But oh how the love, it still wrecks me every time." ??
It seems to not be grammatically correct to me, but I just wanted to double check. I imagine the grammatically correct way to write it would be "But oh how the love still wrecks me every time." ... However, I'm hoping to stick with how I currently have it because the correct way doesn't fit in terms of the flow of the song. So I'll likely just claim artistic license and keep it the way have it... but I also wanted to double check if it could be considered grammatically correct or not.
Thanks in advance!
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What you have there is a typical construction from spoken language. It is called an anacoluthon, specifically a retraction: you begin the sentence, then break off, retract to before the word you have just uttered ("love"), and then continue using another word ("it").
This construction is considered wrong in standard written language (e.g. in a business letter), but quite common and appropriate in poetic language. In spoken language it is so ubiquitous that few people even notice it: if you ask someone what has been said, they are often convinced that the "corrected" sentence had been spoken and have forgotten the anacoluthon.
Personally, I would delete the "the", because "love", in the sense that you seem to use it, is an uncountable noun, and add a few commas:
But, oh, how love, it still wrecks me every time.
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