A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING

by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,


Whilst some of their sad friends do say,


"Now his breath goes," and some say, “No.”


So let us melt, and make no noise                   5

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;

Men reckon what it did, and meant;              10

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

Whose soul is sense cannot admit

Of absence, 'cause it doth remove                 15

The thing 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

                                                                       20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so                      25

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show         To

move, but doth, if th' other do.  

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet, when the other far. doth roam                 30

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;

Thy firmness makes my circle just                 35

And makes me end where I begun

Sunday, August 21, 2011

A lot of people think this is Donne’s best stuff, but it’s not as passionate, witty, or alive as the other poems I’ve looked at here.  I guess Donne was leaving town and he wanted his wife to not worry about him straying. The fact that you have to write a poem like that is suspicious to me. The whole thing feels dishonest.  Still, I’ll slog through it for you since so many teachers and texts worship it.

A valediction is a farewell speech or poem, so the title means, I’m leaving, baby, don’t cry. Already, I’m annoyed.  How can you forbid someone to be sad?  Donne comes off as pompous from the start.

The first stanza is the most real.  When my father died, we sat around him and did this exact thing... monitoring each breath and whispering about whether it was his last.  Donne, the master conceit writer, now has to tell us what in Sam’s Hell that has to do with him leaving town for a while.


See, he’s saying, “When really serious stuff happens, like death, sensible people don’t make a scene.  He says crying out loud would somehow make a profound experience less holy.  That’s why he calls other people “The laity.” His and his wife’s love is sacred, and they are the high priests of it while others are just lay, as in not ordained.

The spheres were Aristotle’s idea of how the universe worked.  He thought that each planet or constellation was part of a huge crystalline sphere.. the earth was in the center of all these spheres.  If the sphere’s rubbed together, that would make “music of the spheres” kind of like the tones you make when you rub your wet finger around the rim of a wine glass.  “Trepidation of the spheres,” I guess, would be more serious astral-banging, maybe causing novas or meteor showers or who knows what crazy stuff.


Donne is saying, earthquakes, which are little compared to the whole universe, cause grief, but immense cataclysms in the stars don’t effect us.  So, because our love is heavenly, this horrible thing, our separation, won’t hurt us.  I know, it’s bogus.


He says here that people who can’t stand separation are just physical lovers.  “Sublunary” means under the moon, or earthly.  Basically these people’s love is based on sex.  They can’t love without the “the thing which elemented” their love... the other person’s body

Awww, he tells her... our love is spiritual, we can’t understand it because it has been refined of all the impurities of lust and of the physical world, which we are a part of .  “Inter-assured” means mutually trusting.  I don’t buy it 100%.  I’m old, and although I sometimes look at my girl and think, “ I’m just happy,”  a minute later I want to kiss her and stuff.  AND STUFF!

Now he dives back into a couple conceits.  First he says... our love is like a piece of gold foil that can be expanded to great lengths without breaching.  Notice he plays the soulmate card again.

Right away though, he contradicts himself.  He says... Okay, maybe we each have our own souls, but they are connected the way the two legs of those compasses we use to draw circles in geometry class are connected.  See, you stay home, so you’re the one with the spiky foot.  I travel, so I’m the one that draws the circle. 

We lean toward each other when we separate, just like we’ll be thinking of each other.  When I come home, we grow erect again.  (I know, this could be a sex joke.  Maybe, though, “erect” means strong and stable instead of turgid.)

Because your love is so strong, and I trust you so much (he continues) my journeys will always end where they began, just like the moving foot of the compass makes a perfect circle if the spiky foot doesn’t slip.

Is this a pick up line for math nerds?  “Here, see how this little compass is like us?  This weekend, you be the pencil and I’ll be the spiky thing.” Sorry John, it doesn’t ring true like your other conceits do.