Write an essay of 300 words
1. Attempt a critical appreciation of John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding?
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning Mourning is one of the better-known poems of Donne for its conceit of the compass. It is a typical metaphysical poem which was addressed to the poet’s wife. It was written on the occasion of the poet’s departure for France with Sir Robert Drury.
The poem expresses Donne’s positive attitude towards love. The basic theme of the poem is the union of true lovers even when they are physically separated. The poet piles up a number of arguments to prove the point, and thus he persuades his beloved not to grieve at the time of his departure for France. Donne says to his wife that like the virtuous people, let them also accept their separation quietly with no tears or sighs.
Donne is poking fun at the idea that tears would cause a flood, or turbulence of deep sigh is sufficient to let lose a tempest. The poet says that their love is something spiritual and so the physical separation that they endure is not be dreaded. Only the earthly love will break and cracks when there is separation. Their love fined that it is not dependent on physical sensation.
The poet further says that love has fused their two souls into one. Therefore, even if he has to go away, their souls would not be separated. His absence would not cause any breach of in their love. Rather, his going away, only means that their love would cover a larger area, just as gold, when beaten, does not break but expands wider and wider.
Metaphysical means which is beyond physical - the immortal soul and the existence of a supreme being. Donne employs the famous metaphysical conceit of the compass to prove the nature of their love. They are like the two legs of a compass. She is like the fixed foot of the compass which remains fixed at the center. But it leans and follows the other foot when it moves, and grows erect and unites with the moving foot when it returns to the starting point after completing the circle. Similarly, it is the firmness of her love that enables him to complete his journey successfully and then return home.
The poem is a typical metaphysical poem with its brilliant use of an array of poetic techniques such as metaphor, paradox, simile, conceit, alliteration, and rhyme scheme, with objects and ideas drawn from a wide spectrum of knowledge, life astronomy, metallurgy, geology, and geometry.
POEM
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,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
