A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

First Paragraph (Stanzas 1-4)

“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne is about a man saying goodbye to his lover before he dies. In the first four stanzas, he is describing how their love is different than other loves, and how just because they have to be apart doesn’t mean they have to fall apart. He says in the first paragraph that they’re parting should resemble the death of an old man, gentle, and you can’t even tell he has stopped breathing. In the third stanza, he says they’re love is unlike an earthquake, because earthquake’s cause pain and suffering for a moment or two, but in the long run are innocent, and their love has a more lasting effect. There is actually an allusion in the line “trepidation of the spheres” to the Greek myth that the revolving planets created a song that controlled everyone’s destiny. In the fourth stanza, he talks about couple’s whose relationship is fueled by lust, and how that couple couldn’t survive the distance like they will because parting “doth remove those things which elemented it”. He uses a bit of sarcasm in the first line “Dull sublunary lovers’ love” because he making fun of the cliché couples who fall in love in the moonlight, as the tale goes.

Second Paragraph (Stanzas 5-9)

In the next five stanzas, John Donne goes from talking about how the speaker and his lover are different by comparing them to different types of couples, to talking about their relationship specifically. He says in the fifth stanza that their love is so much bigger than anyone else’s that it’s hard to fathom its’ complexity. He tells her that they share a soul, so they will stay connected no matter what, through a breach or an expansion. He then contradicts this last statement in stanza seven and eight by saying that if their souls are two and not one, they are two like the two legs of a mathematical compass are two: one sits in the middle (his lover), while the other revolves around it (speaker), but in the end, they will always come together. He tells her in the last stanza that she holds him down, and without her, his circle would be ungeometrically correct, and he wouldn’t be able to come back to where he began and complete the circle.