John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

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4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

The English writer and Anglican cleric John Donne is considered now to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time. He was born in 1572 to Roman Catholic parents, when practicing that religion was illegal in England. His work is distinguished by its emotional and sonic intensity and its capacity to plumb the paradoxes of faith, human and divine love, and the possibility of salvation. Donne often employs conceits, or extended metaphors, to yoke together “heterogenous ideas,” in the words of Samuel Johnson, thus generating the powerful ambiguity for which his work is famous. After a resurgence in his popularity in the early 20th century, Donne’s standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday,
0:07.8	November 10, 2003. Today's poem is by none other than John Dunn, the great metaphysical poet,
0:18.7	and it's called A Validiction Forbidding Morning.
0:22.7	I'll read it once, say something or other, read it one more time.
0:28.6	A Validiction Forbidding Morning
0:30.8	As virtuous men pass mildly away and whisper to their souls to go, while some of their sad
0:40.2	friends do say, the breath goes now and some say, no.
0:44.7	So let us melt and make no noise, no tear floods, nor sigh tempests move, to a profanation
0:51.1	of our joys to tell the laity of our love.
0:55.2	Moving the earth brings harms and fears, men reckon what it did and meant, but trepidation
1:00.9	of the spheres, though greater far, is instant.
1:04.8	Dulled sublunary lovers love whose soul is sense, cannot admit absence because it doth remove those things which
1:12.3	elemented it. But we, by a love so much refined, that ourselves know not what it is, inter-assured
1:20.2	of the mind, careless eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls, therefore, which are one, though I must go, endure not yet a breach,
1:31.1	but an expansion, like gold to every thinness beat. If they be two, they are too so, as stiff twin
1:39.1	compasses are two. Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth if the other do.
1:46.9	And though it in the center sit, it when the other far doth roam, it leans and hearkens after
1:52.8	it and grows erect as that comes home.
1:56.0	Such wilt thou be to me, who must, like the other foot, obliquely run.
2:00.6	Thy firmness makes my circle just,
2:03.1	and makes me end where I begun.
2:14.8	As the story goes, John Dunn wrote this poem sometime around 1611 or 1612 for his wife
	...

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