Literary Criticism Response

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

The Poem

John Donne’s nine quatrains of iambic pentameter make up one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. In the 1675 (fourth) edition of his Life of Donne, Izaak Walton claimed that the author gave these lines to his wife in 1611 just before leaving for France. Whether the details of Walton’s account are true, the title reflects the content of the piece: a farewell. The poem is thus in the tradition of the congé d’amour, a consolation when lovers part.

The poem begins with the image of virtuous men mildly accepting death. The separation of body and soul is so gentle that those friends surrounding the dying cannot tell whether the men are alive or not. So, Donne says, should he and his beloved part, because they do not want to reveal the quality of their love to the uninitiated. Here, then, is the first reason to forbid mourning.

Through a series of elaborate metaphors, Donne offers a second reason. When an earthquake occurs, causing only small cracks in the ground, everyone is disturbed and regards the event as ominous, but when planets move apart, though the distances are great, no harm results. Earthly lovers, Donne continues, cannot accept separation; they fear it as people do earthquakes, because sensory and sensual stimuli make up the entirety of their affection. Donne and his beloved, however, who love spiritually as well as physically, are less troubled by being apart. Their two souls, being one, remain united even when their bodies are apart, just as gold stretches thinly without breaking.

Even if the lovers retain their individual souls, they are divided only like the two parts of a compass used to describe a circle, linked at the top and working in unison. When the compass draws a circle, one point remains stationary in the center but leans toward the other, and by remaining firmly in one place, the fixed point guarantees that its partner will complete its circuit. So the beloved will, by remaining at home, ensure Donne’s return; since he will certainly come back, mourning is inappropriate.

Forms and Devices

In “The Life of Cowley,” Samuel Johnson labeled the poetry of John Donne and others of his ilk “metaphysical.” In such writing, Johnson observed, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” The images that Donne employs seem removed from the occasion of the lovers’ parting: death, celestial motion, twin compasses. All, however, carry within them the promise of reunion, resurrection, and permanence after change. The virtuous man does not fear death because he knows that at the Last Judgment his body and soul will be rejoined forever in bliss. Though Donne and his beloved are “dead” when divided, they may part confident in having a life together hereafter in this world. The comparison of lover and beloved to body and soul is conventional; Donne extends the idea to make it fresh by incorporating religious implications, a technique he uses often in his poetry. Since both love and religion are mysterious and forms of transcendence, the fusion of the two is justified.

The geological-astronomical imagery that introduces the second argument similarly promises reunion. The separation of sensual lovers is like an earthquake in part because these people are “sublunary”; Donne here draws on the belief that everything beneath the moon is subject to mutability and death. Sublunary lovers fear parting because they can never be certain that they will see each other again. Just as the cleavages caused by earthquakes do not necessarily repair themselves, these terrestrial, hence inferior, lovers may not reunite.

Likening lovers to Earth and other planets is typical of Donne and his fellow Metaphysical poets. Yet the metaphors are not mere poetical trickery. The macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the individual become interchangeable because the metaphors convey the lovers’ feelings. Donne and his beloved are the world to each other.

Donne and his beloved are, like the planets, beyond the realm of change because they are joined spiritually as well as physically. Since their love is not subject to alteration, they need not fear parting. Moreover, medieval cosmology maintained that in 36,000 years the planets and stars would return to their positions at the moment of creation. The completion of this epoch will mark the apocalypse and resurrection. This image thus unites with and extends the previous one anticipating the Last Judgment.

The conceit of the twin compasses, probably the most famous of Donne’s metaphors, similarly builds on the previous one. Just as the planets describe a circuit in 36,000 years, so the compasses make a circle of 360 degrees. It is no accident that the poem has thirty-six lines. The circle is a traditional symbol of eternal love, since it has no beginning and no end (hence the tradition of the wedding ring). The completion of the circle once more promises the lovers’ meeting at journey’s end.

In a curious sexual reversal, Donne likens his beloved to the masculine principle. Hers is the foot that grows erect as his point approaches. Hers is the firmness that, phalluslike, fills his circle and makes it “just”; the word not only implies the completed round and physical reunion but also circles back to the virtuous (just) man at the beginning of the poem, so that the poem, like Donne, ends where it began.

Themes and Meanings

The sexual imagery that concludes the poem does not contradict the pervasive spirituality of the piece, but complements it. John Donne has been called the poet of mutual love, and though he may play diverse roles — the cynical lover of “The Indifferent,” the Platonic lover in “The Relic” — he is also the advocate of physical and spiritual love united. “Dull, sublunary lovers” rely totally on the physical, so their love cannot survive absence. Donne and his beloved may “care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,” but they do care. The need for both types of love is evident in the metaphor of the twin compasses. The circular motion of the compasses, like the circular orbits of the planets in Aristotelian physics, symbolizes heavenly love, since all movement above the moon takes this shape. Sublunary motion is linear, and that is the figure the two points of the compass describe when they move together in a plane. Together, the divine circle and animal line create the human spiral. Donne rejects the duality of body and soul: Love for him is not one or the other, but both — a single, indivisible entity.

Hence, Donne rejects the Petrarchan idealization of the beloved as untouchable and godlike. He employs the imagery of Petrarch in the second stanza when he speaks of “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,” but in forbidding such forms of mourning the poem distances itself from the philosophy that relies on such metaphors. Donne’s love is human, as is his beloved. The opening lines may imply that she is body and he soul, thereby suggesting that he is purer than she; the second stanza dispels such a reading, linking the lovers in the pronoun “us.” In the third stanza, each is a planet, and later their souls are one. The twin compasses may be understood as portraying that same fusion, one foot being the will, the other reason. As body and soul require each other for life, so will and reason cannot operate independently. The sexual reversal of the last stanza corresponds to the beloved’s assuming the controlling role of reason, which guides the errant will; its fixedness converts the will’s centrifugal force into the circle, a pattern of constancy. Love reconciles opposites and accepts no mastery of one party over the other.

In chapter 12 of La vita nuova (c. 1292; The New Life), Dante writes, speaking as love, “I am as the center of a circle, to which all parts of the circumference stand in equal relation.” This passage may have provided Donne with the idea for his famous conceit of the twin compasses; it certainly expresses the same vision of love’s unifying and godlike power, of love as the still center around which the world revolves and to which all things return to find that rest that they can experience nowhere else.

The image of the dying men that introduces the piece indicates the fusion of Donne and his beloved as body and soul and promises resurrection, but the focus on death is too gloomy for the purpose the author intends. The planets have much to recommend them as a metaphor: Again the imagery promises return, and the orbits of the planets in Donne’s Ptolemaic system describe circles. Yet if the first metaphor falls short because of its rootedness in mortality, the second proves equally unsatisfactory because it divorces itself from humanity. Only with the twin compasses does the poet find that perfect fusion of human and divine, flesh and spirit, line and circle, that constitutes true love. The author has succeeded in his quest for the correct language in which to couch his meaning, and in the process of creating his poem he has moved from death and separation to life and reunion, imitating the experience the verses promise.

Essay by: Joseph Rosenblum

Source: Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition