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A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning – John Donne

Interesting – according to Melanie Klein mourning can be creative and reconstructing. Despite Donne’s injunction the poem seems to achieve this in a reconstruction of a sense of self; beginning over again.

my word in your ear

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

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-assured 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,
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By penwithlit

Freelance writer and radio presenter

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