A Valediction Forbidding Mourning (John Donne) The poem "A Val

The poem begins with the speaker discussing how some people die without sadness while their friends mourn their death. The speaker says that "virtuous men pass mildly away And whisper their souls to go" (lines 1-2). He means that people who have lived good lives do not fear death but their friends will miss them when they are gone. Therefore, the speaker sets up the relationship of two people who love each other but must part from each other that he will keep coming back to throughout the poem.

In the next stanza, the speaker strengthens the divine nature of his love relationship that he set up with the comparison to a person's relationship with God in the first line. He says it would be "profanation of our joys To tell the laity of our love" (lines 7-8). The use of the word "laity" suggests the divine nature of his love. The speaker then again strengthens the divine metaphor when he compares the fear that men feel for natural occurrences like earthquakes û

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aces the use of the word "elemented" back to William of Conches, who, in 1130, compared the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire to our physical attributes of "humors, bones, hands and feet" (Laird 120). Laird argues that these four elements relate to Donne's line in the program about the "eyes, lips, and hands" that "sublunar" lovers miss in their lovers' absence. Thus, Laird argues that Donne used the word "elemented" to contrast the otherwordly nature of his love and strengthen the poem's richness and complexity by using a word with such an intellectual history (Laird 123). However, the hidden intellectualism in Donne's use of words such as "inter-assured" and "elemented" also suggests that the persona Donne adopts in the poem is somewhat facetious. He is using a poem about love, which is supposed to be one of the strongest human emotions and desires, to prove his superiority to the sort of emotion most people would think he was writing about. Donne further proves his facetiousness through the metaphor of his love relationship as a circle. The speaker tells his lover that "Our two souls therefore, which are one" (line 21). But their being apart is not a breach in their relationship, but an expansion of it. The s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1275
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)