JOHN DONNE

[1572–1631]

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Born in London to a prosperous Catholic family (through his mother he was related to statesman and author Sir Thomas More and the playwright John Heywood), John Donne (1572–1631) studied at Oxford University for several years but did not take a degree. He fought with Sir Walter Raleigh in two naval strikes against Spain. In 1601 Donne’s promising political career was permanently derailed by his precipitate marriage to Anne More without her father’s consent. He was briefly imprisoned, lost a very promising position with Sir Thomas Egerton, and spent years seeking political employment before finally being persuaded by King James in 1615 to become a priest of the Church of England. His life was described by Isaac Walton later in the century as having been divided into two parts. In Phase I he was “Jack Donne” of Lincoln’s Inn: when young, Donne employed a sophisticated urban wit that lent a sort of jaded tone to his earlier poetry. “The Flea” presumably appeared during this stage of his life and is a typical metaphysical poem. In Phase II he was John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s: after Donne took holy orders in 1615 his poetry became markedly less amorous and more religious in tone. His Holy Sonnets, of which “Batter my heart, three-personed God” is one, are as dense and complex as his earlier work but directed toward an exploration of his relationship with God.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

The breath goes now, and some say, No;

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.

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 admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined

That our selves 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 yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center 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.