Today’s Poem: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Donne’s graceful love
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 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 th’ earth brings harms 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 our selves know not what it is, Inter-assured 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 th’ other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. ═══════════════════════
It was in his 1779 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets that Samuel Johnson first pointed out “a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets.”
As it happens, the phrase appears in a discussion of Abraham Cowley (1618–1667). In the long years since, however — from Johnson’s 18th-century disparagement to T.S. Eliot’s 20th-century resuscitation — the central poet has come to be taken as John Donne (1572–1631), with Today’s Poem, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” the obvious showpiece: the most metaphysical-poet-like poem of Donne’s metaphysical-poet work.
First published in 1633, after Donne’s death, “A Valediction” was written around 1611, probably for his wife Anne before he left on a trip to the Continent. It runs nine tetrameter quatrains, tightly rhymed abab, in iambic lines with only a few variations. Mòv-ing / of th’èarth / brings hàrms / and fèars, for example: an inverted first foot. And Dull sublunary lovers’ love, which could be scanned in a few different ways, although I find myself reading it aloud as Dùll sub- / lùn-ar-y / lòv-ers’ / lòve, a tone-painting step into a falling rhythm to signal the difference of dull lovers.
But the poem’s mostly regular rhythm serves in good part as unremarkable background — which allows the remarkable peculiarity of the metaphors to stand in the foreground. If there were ever reasons for Johnson’s complaint of “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together” in metaphysical poetry, “A Valediction” looks as though it provides them.
I think that’s wrong. A theological sensibility may tie the disparate elements together. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Donne has given us a love poem in which a couple’s relationship is explained using the poorly mourned death of virtuous men, the initiations of mystery religions, an earthquake, Ptolemaic astronomy, alchemical gold, and the uses of a geometer’s compass.
Any of these is worth exploring. The initial parting of lovers as death, for instance: a death accepted by the dying man of virtue but so subtle that the watching friends are uncertain whether the final moment has arrived — which somehow provides a metaphor for how “mildly” the lovers should accept their parting. And which segues into the lovers as secret clergy whose parting, without “tear-floods” or “sigh-tempests” (both weather figures), helps hide from the profane laity the priestly joys of the initiates’ love.
Or the earthquake image, which is unlike the “trepidation of the spheres” (the wobble added to Ptolemaic astronomy to make it more accurate). Earthquakes cause “harms and fears,” but starquakes, the shaking of astronomical bodies, though “greater far” in magnitude, are nonetheless “innocent,” because celestial motion doesn’t do physical damage. It’s beyond the circle of the moon, while down in the sublunary realm, love is “elemented,” requiring physical contact. And so the parting of these lovers is, by complex metaphor, a celestial thing. “Our two souls” endure not “a breach, but an expansion,” which is further explained with the image of “gold to airy thinness beat” — the loveliest of Donne’s metaphors: love like gold foil, thinned to cover the distance of the lovers from each other but still unbroken.
And then we get the drawing compass, a figure elaborate enough that Donne uses three stanzas to develop it. A compass can sketch a “just” circle, accurate and perfect, with the fixed leg at the center and the moveable leg drawing the circumference. But the center leg is fixed only at its point; it “leans and hearkens,” turning on its spot in response to the motion of the other leg.
Donne may be making an erotic pun, when the center element “grows erect” as the traveling leg closes with it physically, except that the center leg is the female element in the image. Besides, the drawn circle is the complete figure Donne has in view, with the shared love drawing the geometrical figure of eternity.
Through all this knotty stuff, Donne is showing us “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together,” isn’t he? Well, yes — except that a theological sense is discernible in the poem. Such terms as “laity,” “profanation,” and “innocent” may look like scattered borrowings, but Donne, I think, is doing more than decorating eroticism with religious diction.
Take, for instance, the death image in the opening figure. In the ars moriendi, the “art of dying,” a good death is undramatic, indistinguishable from stillness. Donne asks his beloved to practice this spiritual discipline on the lesser death of his departure.
So too the “laity” as unworthy of learning the mystery knowledge of the initiates. And so too the innocence of the superlunary realm — a theologically loaded cosmology, a physics that echoes the distinction of the fallen world and the heavenly.
Perhaps most of all that curious line about being “Inter-assured of the mind.” Donne is making a mind/body distinction there, of course: True love is “Care less” of the physical “eyes, lips, and hands” absent with the lover’s departure. But assurance (of salvation) is a weighted word in the theology of the time. The psychology of election matches the psychology of love: The lovers don’t need the outward signs of the body because they are inter-assured in their loving minds.
And then there are the theological echoes in the responsiveness of the compass. If nothing else, Donne’s “Makes me end where I begun” borrows the geometric emblem of divine perfection in a circle (from Plato to Dante) and claims it for the shape that the lovers trace in the world. The good death of the opening returns to the good homecoming of the lovers’ joined end. The poem’s conceits are yoked not so much by violence as by grace.
I would say most likely “sublunary” was intended to be stressed on the first syllable: SUblu*na*ry. There’s a line in a William Drummond poem where it really can’t be pronounced another way: “Do blind men in these sublunary lists”. The scansion you’ve suggested, opening on what I call a “stuttered swing” (DUM-di | DUM-di-di-DUM), while an acceptable variation in dramatic verse, would have been considered pretty wild within a formal poem in Donne’s day (though if anyone was bold enough to do it, it was Donne!)
Speaking of the pronunciation of his day, there’s this line:
“A breach, but an expansion,”
He *expands* that last word to fit the meter! Similarly to how “Romeo” can count metrically as either two or three syllables (“Rome-yo” or “Ro-mi-oh”), that “-sion” ending could count as either one or two (“-shyun” or “she-un”). Here, very fittingly, it’s expanded: “ex-pan-she-un”. A pity modern poets don’t have that option!
Thanks for this great explication, Jody.