True Love Facing Separation in John Donne's A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
True love facing separation in John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
Before getting into detail concerning the topic of true love in combination with separation I’d like to give a short overview for how I have understood the content and action in John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”.
The poem, made up of nine stanzas, each with four lines with an ABAB rhyme, is about someone that as a speaker talks about his situation having to spend time apart from his lover. The speaker is male and speaks to his beloved woman. He does not want her to suffer or grieve because of the pending separation.
As honorable men die without complaint, he thinks that their farewell should happen without emotional outbursts as well. If they would show their feelings to the world it would devalue their love. So, the speaker compares the separation or the farewell with dying.
The speaker says that when the earth is in motion, there are “harms and fears,” (l. 9) but when the spheres experience “trepidation,” it is still innocent although it is more far-reaching. That is how their love is.
An ordinary love is not able to come through separation, because the presence of the lovers was what elementarily constituted their love. So absence steals this and their love cannot exist any longer.
In contrast, the love the speaker shares with his beloved is so special and anchored in their minds so that they need not think about missing the physical presence of each other.
He needs to go but this does not change the safety of the unity of their souls. It does not impair their love. It will only give it a bigger meaning, like an “expansion” (l. 23) of love. The soul they share will simply stretch to take all the space between them like the way a piece of gold can be beaten out more and more to cover a larger area, but is always unbroken.
He compares their separate souls with the feet of a compass while his lover’s soul is the fixed foot in the
Before getting into detail concerning the topic of true love in combination with separation I’d like to give a short overview for how I have understood the content and action in John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”.
The poem, made up of nine stanzas, each with four lines with an ABAB rhyme, is about someone that as a speaker talks about his situation having to spend time apart from his lover. The speaker is male and speaks to his beloved woman. He does not want her to suffer or grieve because of the pending separation.
As honorable men die without complaint, he thinks that their farewell should happen without emotional outbursts as well. If they would show their feelings to the world it would devalue their love. So, the speaker compares the separation or the farewell with dying.
The speaker says that when the earth is in motion, there are “harms and fears,” (l. 9) but when the spheres experience “trepidation,” it is still innocent although it is more far-reaching. That is how their love is.
An ordinary love is not able to come through separation, because the presence of the lovers was what elementarily constituted their love. So absence steals this and their love cannot exist any longer.
In contrast, the love the speaker shares with his beloved is so special and anchored in their minds so that they need not think about missing the physical presence of each other.
He needs to go but this does not change the safety of the unity of their souls. It does not impair their love. It will only give it a bigger meaning, like an “expansion” (l. 23) of love. The soul they share will simply stretch to take all the space between them like the way a piece of gold can be beaten out more and more to cover a larger area, but is always unbroken.
He compares their separate souls with the feet of a compass while his lover’s soul is the fixed foot in the