21 pages • 42 minutes read
John DonneA Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1633A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Elevation of Love and Sex as Sacred
Though primarily known for his interest in the divine and for the political sphere that shaped his environment, Donne was (and still is) also widely celebrated as one of the great love poets. In his poems, love is elevated as sacred and is merged with faith to challenge notions of corporeality (see Themes). The poem, though titled through a mechanism suggesting a formal farewell, is widely considered a love poem at its core. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” the poet presents love as faith and faith as love—the concepts are unable to be divorced, despite external circumstance. The romantic declaration of the speaker and his inability for separation from his lover is achieved through the theme of faith.
Donne’s love poems seek a reciprocity from their addressee and invite dialogue. Donne was suspicious of the overly decorative and elevated language of the love poems before him; much of his work seeks to not only complicate these flattened sentiments but to expand them to create new definitions. By elevating love and sex as sacred entities, Donne’s metaphysical proclivities are prominently on display in this poem.
The Abandonment of Corporeality
Poets have always—and will always—write about death. The theme of death, though widely addressed, uniquely manifests in Donne’s work because of his historical placement in the metaphysical tradition. Keenly aware of his own inevitable death and well-versed in religious doctrines of the afterlife, Donne constructs a unique and refreshing approach toward death (or loss) in the poem: It may be the end (or absence) of the physical body, but it is not the end of his respective love for his lover.
Right away, Donne addresses the theme of death in the title. The title of a poem is often used to signal the poetic mode employed and to set up rhetorical and lexical expectations for a reader. For instance, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” provides the form of a valediction: a statement or address meant to signal a farewell. Because of the title, the poem is charged with the impending notion of farewell and departure. Keeping in the tradition of paradox, however, Donne subverts the expectations of a traditional valediction by suggesting that there is no need for mourning as he and his lover will remain together in spirit. Not unlike William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55—“Not marble nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme”—Donne is concerned with the lasting memory and legend of the soul rather than the body. In this valediction, though the speaker must journey onward, he and his lover’s souls remain one. Therefore, their departure from each other is not a breach, but rather an expansion.
Purity
Donne was concerned with the search for one true religion and therefore sought out purity in various aspects of his life. Having been written during a time of religious unrest in England, the speaker of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” positions his love in the traditional sense of a “soulmate” similar to how one might seek one religion to adopt. Donne remained married to the same woman his entire life and this poem hints at that purity of commitment and feeling. For Donne, the mutual love between the speaker and his beloved is “so much refined” (Line 17) that they “know not what it is” (Line 18). This lack of understanding for their unique love translates to a purity of emotion and thought that transcends conventional notions of mutual love. Their refined love is so pure that it even transcends the body.
Related Titles
By John Donne
