Waxing Poetic: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne

 

     John Donne is my favorite poet, and this is one of my favorite of his poems. It was written in 1611 to his wife, Anne More Donne, to comfort her while he was away in France on government business and she remained at home in England. The poem argues that he and his wife will remain together spiritually even though they are apart physically. It contains one of Donne's most famous metaphors: he compares his relationship with his wife to that of the two legs of a drawing compass. The poem was not published until 1633, two years after Donne's death in a poetry collection entitled Songs and Sonnets.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

"The breath goes now," and some say

"No";

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harm and fears;

Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent,

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined

That ourselves know not what it is,

Inter-assurèd of the mind,

Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth if the other do,

And though it in the center sit,

Yet, when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like the other foot obliquely run:

Thy firmness draws my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

     If you are a fan of Donne's poetry, you might enjoy the novel The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. It is the story of a British calligrapher (one of the few left who earn a living at it) who has been commissioned to transcribe the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne for a rich American client. As he works on the commission, he finds that the poems begin to illuminate his own experiences. The novel is witty and clever, like Donne's poems. I thought it was a great read with an unexpected ending.

     If you're into the lives of poets, you might enjoy The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran. It tells of Donne's courtship of his wife, Anne. They married against her father's wishes and those of his employer's (her uncle by marriage). As a result, he lost his job and was imprisoned for a brief time.

 - Frances