And it’s gloriously frank – it begins with Donne chastising the sun for peeping through the curtains, rousing him and his lover as they lie in bed together of a morning. This is how one of Donne’s most celebrated poems begins. Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time … Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride, Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Other couples, who are bonded physically but don’t have this deeper spiritual connection, couldn’t bear to be physically apart like that … This kinship between their souls means that they can transcend the physical basis of their relationship and so endure time apart from each other, while Donne is on the Continent and his wife remains back at home. In ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, Donne likens the relationship between him and his wife to a religious or spiritual bond between two souls: note that he uses the word ‘laity’ to describe other people who cannot understand the love the two of them bear one another.
Utilising metaphors of compass points and alchemical processes to describe the relationship between the husband and wife, ‘A Valediction’ is one of the finest examples of Metaphysical poetry. ‘ A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning‘.Īs this poem’s title suggests, it’s a poem of farewell, written by Donne for his wife Anne in 1611-12 before he left England to go on a mission to Europe.
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