A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Since Donne chose to frame the poem through the mechanism of the title, a formal farewell, and to immediately situate his readers in a setting of loss, it is poignant that the tone and subsequent content adopts a hopeful mode of consolation. Though this funeral scene is important in how it sets up the poet’s argument in the rest of the poem, because of the poem’s lyric mode, this initial scene is not meant to be read as a literal or material observation of the speaker. One can infer this from the lack of specificity in time, place, or person. Donne is not concerned with one external individual death and its corresponding memorial. Rather, Donne more abstractly and complexly addresses the scene of a memorial to console his lover and expand her thinking on how death and loss should be approached. Though the poem is widely read as a broad nod to the inevitability of death, some scholars have suggested that given the occasion of the poem’s original composition—Donne journeying the continent with Sir Robert Drury—that the separation of the lover and speaker can also be read as more temporary. In the latter reading, “tell[ing] the laity of [their] love” (Line 8) could reference Donne and Anne More’s clandestine love affair. Regardless, the public display of mourning in the first stanza is used to frame the speaker’s discussion in the remainder of the poem.

Donne was known for his devotion to what is often called “spiritual love”; this poem is perhaps the most famous example of his tendency to transcend the physical. It is also one of the simplest. Donne’s speaker anticipates an inevitable separation from his lover and therefore conjures spiritual love to dismiss the notion of the corporeal as necessary. What might otherwise result in “tear-floods” (Line 6) is mediated through the insistence of spiritual and eternal love. Donne’s private audience was often just Anne More; as such, the poem embodies an intimate mode. Donne scholar Ilona Bell, notes that “the intimacy of tone, the distressing, inescapable imminence of the journey, and the persuasive pressure to keep their love alive when he is away, implies the presence of a private female lyric audience.” The poem implies an elitist status accompanying the acceptance of spiritual love. For Donne, few can reach this level of emotional and spiritual intelligence and access the same spiritual love of his spheres. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Donne’s elite few are his speaker and their lover.

The poem’s first two stanzas begin respectively with “[a]s” (Line 1) and “[s]o” (Line 5). This connectivity creates a subverted anaphora—the use of a word in substitute of an earlier used word—and is part of an extended simile extending across stanzas. “As virtuous men pass mildly away” (Line 1)” shifts to “[s]o let us melt, and make no noise” (Line 5), introducing the speaker’s logic: As good people peacefully die, so should the speaker and their love peacefully depart. The poem’s first two stanzas introduce public mourning and criticize those displays. The speaker uses these public displays of sadness to urge his lover to mourn differently or, rather, not at all. This happens at the end of the second stanza where Donne’s speaker urges his lover not to openly cry. The lexical use of “laity” (Line 8) and “profanation” (Line 8) exemplify religious terminology used throughout the poem that hint at the setting and occasion.

The next two stanzas help establish the love of others to set up the poem’s climactic turn in Stanza Five: “But we by a love so much refined” (Line 16). Stanza Five positions the love of the speaker and his beloved as unique and sacred to the point of surpassing embodiment. Donne’s speaker abandons corporeality and urges his beloved to “[c]are less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss” (Line 20); further, he compels her to mourn not the physical and corporeal loss of his body. He suggests their love transcends material manifestations. Donne’s speaker submits a sequence of assurances to his lover, urging her to keep their love alive despite his death. This argumentative approach, standard in metaphysical poetry, is particularly reliant on the metaphysical conceit.

Stanza Six provides perhaps the most prominent and recognizable example of the metaphysical conceit: Donne’s “twin compasses” (Line 26). The “twin compasses” are meant to represent the lovers’ souls: “If they be two, they are two so / as twin compasses are two” (Lines 25-26). The argument solidifies in Stanza Seven, “[t]hy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the other do” (Lines 27-28), wherein Donne establishes the conclusion of his conceit. Stanza Seven also works to assure of the speaker’s lover that although one compass foot “in the center sit / Yet when the other far doth roam” (Lines 29-30), it will “[hearken] after it” (Line 31).

Stanza Nine, the final quatrain, further extends the conceit of the compasses, noting circularity and further complicating notions of linearity. The presence of the spherical or circular is significant regarding the abandonment of linearity (see Symbol/Motifs for further analysis on The Spherical and The Passage of Time). The concluding line of the poem, “And makes me end where I begun” (Line 45), solidifies this notion of eternal revolution and circularity. This conclusion can be read as a subtle ironic metacommentary on the notion of writing itself as well as a complication of the linear timeline propelling life toward eventual death. Donne constructs the poem and his corresponding conceit to suggest that, similar to the circular construction of the compass, his life will be an ouroboros: a snake eating its own tail in perpetuity.