Valediction: A Forbidding Mourning, by John Donne

“Valediction: A Forbidding Mourning”

As virtuous men passe mildly away,
And whisper to their soules to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends doe say,
The breath goes now, and some say no:

So let us melt, and make no noise’                          05
No teare-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
’Twere prophanation of our joyes
To tell the layetie our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and feares,
Men reckon what it did and meant;                          10
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove                            15
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love, so much refin’d,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care lesse eyes, lips and hands to misse.               20

Our two soules therefore, which are one,
Though I must goe, endure yet not
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold, to ayery thinness beate.

If they be two, they are two so                                25
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule, the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’other doe.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet, when the other far doth rome,                          30
It leans and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th’other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,                          35
And makes me end, where I begunne.

From: The Wordsworth Poetry Library, The Works of John Donne, with an Introduction and Bibliography (pp. 33-34).

Copyright© Wordsworth Editions Ltd. 1994, ISBN 1-85326-400-8

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