A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Donne, 1633
Donne’s poem of farewell asking his beloved not to mourn their parting, and comparing their two souls to the two legs of a pair of compasses.
As virtuous men pass mildly away,And whisper to their souls to go,Whilst some of their sad friends do say,“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”
So let us melt, and make no noise,No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;’Twere profanation of our joysTo tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;Men reckon what it did, and meant;But trepidation of the spheres,Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love—Whose soul is sense—cannot admitOf absence, ’cause it doth removeThe thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so far refined,That ourselves know not what it is,Inter-assurèd of the mind,Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,Though I must go, endure not yetA breach, but an expansion,Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two soAs stiff twin compasses are two;Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no showTo move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,Yet, when the other far doth roam,It leans, and hearkens after it,And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;Thy firmness makes my circle just,And makes me end where I begun.