A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning Summary

In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," the speaker directly addresses his love to
say farewell. He tells her that their love is so pure and holy that they shouldn't weep
the way lesser lovers do when they're separated. Instead, he urges her not to mourn,
promising to come back to her soon.
In the first stanza, the speaker of the poem describes how virtuous men die:
fearlessly. He tells his love that she must be this fearless when he leaves her.
He argues that, because their love is so great and so unusually holy, they
shouldn't reduce themselves to the weeping and melodrama of romantic farewells.
Instead, they should go quietly, rising above the more histrionic laypeople.
He tells his love that the two of them must remain steadfast. He compares
their souls to the feet of a drafting compass used in geometry, telling her that he shall
return to her like the point of a compass returning to where it began.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, probably written to his wife in 1601

before Donne left on a trip to the Continent, has often been anthologized. It is not
only one of Donnes most popular works but also one of his most representative.

The poem rests, as do most of Donnes love poems, in the tradition of

Renaissance love poetry. There is, for example, the conventional analogy of dying
and the parting of lovers; there are references to floods of tears, tempests of sighs,
and the spiritualizing quality of love. The poem is not different in kind from other
poetry of the period, but it is different in degree. Donne and his lover exceed the
traditional model for lovers, for they have so spiritualized their love that to reveal it to
common lovers by weeping at parting would profane it much as a mystic discussing
his or her ecstatic union with God would cheapen that experience.

Further, the poem reveals Donnes awareness of and interest in Renaissance

topics such as astronomy. For his own purposes in this poem, Donne takes the
traditional view and derives his phrase sublunary lovers from the older Ptolemaic
system, which argued that everything beneath the moon was imperfect and
corruptible while all above the moon was perfect and incorruptible. Donne insists that
ordinary love, being beneath the moon, is inferior to his love, which has been made
perfect beyond the moon.

Typically, Donne pushes his argument to more complex levels of

understanding and turns next to the notion of Platonic love, which he also compares
with his own. The basic idea of Platonic love is the idea that, in another world, the
Real World, there exist perfect ideals or archetypes for all particular things that exist
in this, the actual world. Thus, all examples of love in human experience must be
compared to the ideal of love in the Real World in order to determine their validity. In
this framework, Donne argues that his love is the Platonic archetype. Unlike
sublunary, inferior love, which is activated by the senses, Donnes love is nourished
 by the soul. Because of the superior love Donne and his lady enjoy, they should not
behave as ordinary lovers and weep and sigh at parting.

Bringing to bear yet another argument against acting like inferior lovers,
Donne next insists that his soul and the soul of his lover through a mystical union
have become one. Thus, they do not experience a breach in parting but an
expansion like gold to ayery thinnesse beate. Actually, this argument is two-
pronged, for it posits the superiority of Donnes love in that he compares it to gold,
the costliest metal, and it offers further support that perfect love does not weep at
parting, for it cannot admit absence.

The apex of Donnes argument is developed in the last four stanzas of the
poem as he unfolds his famous compass conceit. The metaphor is relatively simple;
its value lies primarily in its success in shocking the reader into new sensibilities. The
lady is the fixed foot of the compass; Donne is the moving foot. The firmer the fixed
foot (the truer the ladys love), the more just the circle of the moving foot.

This conceit, typical of Donnes best, represents an elaboration of a metaphor

to the furthest stage intellect can pursue it. It unifies sensation and reason,
description of things and feelings. Donne stresses the logic of his argument more
than the beauty of his metaphor, and ultimately the reader is likely to be more
impressed with the puzzle of the image, with the fact that it really works, than with its
delineation of character or passion. Thus, the conceit serves as a fitting climax to a
powerful but gentle argument that true lovers secure in the exaltation of their love
disdain public shows of affection.