Summary
The speaker explains
that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover, but before he leaves, he
tells her that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and
sorrow. In the same way that virtuous men die mildly and without complaint, he
says, so they should leave without "tear- floods" and
"sigh-tempests," for to publicly announce their feelings in such a way
would profane their love. The speaker says that when the earth moves, it brings
"harms and fears," but when the spheres experience
"trepidation," though the impact is greater, it is also innocent. The
love of "dull sublunary lovers" cannot survive separation, but it
removes that which constitutes the love itself; but the love he shares with his
beloved is so refined and "Inter-assured of the mind" that they need
not worry about missing "eyes, lips, and hands."
Though he must go, their souls are still one, and, therefore, they are
not enduring a breach, they are experiencing an "expansion"; in the
same way that gold can be stretched by beating it "to aery thinness,"
the soul they share will simply stretch to take in all the space between them.
If their souls are separate, he says, they are like the feet of a compass: His
lover's soul is the fixed foot in the center, and his is the foot that moves
around it. The firmness of the center foot makes the circle that the outer foot
draws perfect: "Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end,
where I begun."
Commentary
"A Valediction: forbidding Mourning" is one of Donne's most
famous and simplest poems and also probably his most direct statement of his
ideal of spiritual love. For all his erotic carnality in poems, such as "The
Flea," Donne professed a devotion to a kind of spiritual love that
transcended the merely physical. Here, anticipating a physical separation from
his beloved, he invokes the nature of that spiritual love to ward off the
"tear-floods" and "sigh-tempests" that might otherwise
attend on their farewell. The poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and
comparisons, each describing a way of looking at their separation that will
help them to avoid the mourning forbidden by the poem's title.
First, the speaker says that their farewell should be as mild as the
uncomplaining deaths of virtuous men, for to weep would be "profanation of
our joys." Next, the speaker compares harmful "Moving of the
earth" to innocent "trepidation of the spheres," equating the
first with "dull sublunary lovers' love" and the second with their
love, "Inter-assured of the mind." Like the rumbling earth, the dull
sublunary (sublunary meaning literally beneath the moon and also subject to the
moon) (overs are all physical, unable to experience separation without losing
the sensation that comprises and sustains their love. But the spiritual lovers
"Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss," because, like the
trepidation (vibration) of the spheres (the concentric globes that surrounded
the earth in ancient astronomy), their love is not wholly physical. Also, like
the trepidation of the spheres, their movement will not have the harmful
consequences of an earthquake.
The speaker then
declares that, since the lovers' two souls are one, his departure will simply
expand the area of their unified soul, rather than cause a rift between them.
If, however, their souls are "two'' instead of "one", they are
as the feet of a drafter's compass, connected, with the center foot fixing the
orbit of the outer foot and helping it to describe a perfect circle. The
compass (the instrument used for drawing circles) is one of Donne's most famous
metaphors, and it is the perfect image to encapsulate the values of Donne's
spiritual love, which is balanced, symmetrical, intellectual, serious, and
beautiful in its polished simplicity.
Like many of Donne's love poems (including "The Sun Rising"
and "The Canonization"), "A Valediction: forbidding
Mourning" creates a dichotomy between the common love of the everyday
world -and the uncommon love of the speaker. Here, the speaker claims that to
tell "the laity," or the common people, of his love would be to
profane its sacred nature, and he is clearly contemptuous of the dull sublunary
love of other lovers. The effect of this dichotomy is to create a kind of
emotional aristocracy that is similar in form to the political aristocracy with
which Donne has had painfully bad luck throughout his life and which he
commented upon in poems, such as "The Canonization" This emotional
aristocracy is similar in form to the political one but utterly opposed to it
in spirit. Few in number are the emotional aristocrats who have access to the
spiritual love of the spheres and the compass; throughout all of Donne's
writing, the membership of this elite never includes more than the speaker and
his lover--or at the most, the speaker, his lover, and the reader of the poem,
who is called upon to sympathize with Donne's romantic plight.
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