A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
John Donne, a seventeenth-century English poet, was born in London in 1572 and known for his ingenuous style of writing (Bloom 10). According to Christopher Moore, an English writer, Donne’ poetry is colloquial in diction and has the flexibility and liveliness of spoken language which imparts an energy and force perfectly capturing his mercurial jumps in thought and description; his poetry is filled with unusual images and metaphor for the fact most of it deals with love and relations between the sexes (Moore 12). Besides “The Flea,” “The Good Morrow,” and others, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is another famous masterpiece for which John Donne is recognized. Izaak Walton, a contemporary of John Donne, stated that “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” was addressed to Donne’s wife, Anne More, on the occasion of his leaving for a continental trip in 1611 (Bloom 63). Donne’s poem is a good example that shows his metaphysical wit, a term was conferred on him along with his followers, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and others by Samuel Johnson, a critic and essayist in the eighteenth-century (Bloom12). To sum up, Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (Apr 84) is such a love and farewell speech among which he uses a series of simile, symbolism, and analogy to express his feelings and comfort his wife while he is abroad.
Donne, in the first two stanzas, uses the image of virtuous men’s death as a metaphor to his separation from his wife to tell her their love is so great to be affected by their physical separation. The poem, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” opens with the image of “As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go, / While some of their sad friends do say, / The breath goes now, and some say, no;” (1-4). The expression “As” Donne uses in the beginning of the first stanza, illustrates that the poem is not about virtuous men who pass away, yet it is a simile Donne creates in order to express his voice, feelings, and point of view about his separation from his wife. In the second stanza, “So let us melt, and make no noise, / No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ; / Twere profanation of our joys / To tell the laity our love” (5-8), Donne urges his wife to stay calm and separate without noise, crying, or sorrow, just like virtuous men who die quietly with no fear while their friends argue over whether the man has died or not; he also uses spiritual language such as profane and laity to convince his wife that mourning about their separation would profane their love and joys, and they as spiritual leader should teach the laity when it comes to spiritual love. To conclude, Donne, in the first two stanzas, creates a metaphor through which he compares the image of virtuous men’s death to his separation from his wife in order to comfort and tell her their love is so strong to be affected by their physical separation.
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