Today we’re back to one of the titans of English poetry,
John Donne. We haven’t seen him for
a couple of years, so he’d a bit overdue.
This one, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, speaks of
separation, as did yesterday’s
poems by Du Fu. Kind of cool how some subjects are natural fodder for
poems, huh? In this instance, the poet is taking leave of his beloved with
reassurances that—with a love as pure and refined as theirs—the distance
between them is merely physical, and they can withstand the separation.
I love it.
“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 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 the other
foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end
where I begun.
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