By John Donne: my favourite of the seventeenth-century poets.*

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 of 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-assurèd 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 th'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.****

Notes:
*my favourite of the seventeenth-century poets: I know. It sounds so portentious I had to write it like that. He's the only one of the seventeenth-century men I know but I like to think they were all poets together in an old-timey strip club.

**Forbidding Mourning: It's not proven yet (and after almost 400 years we're no closer to knowing), but he most likely wrote this for his wife on his trip to the Continent in 1611. While on that trip he envisioned his wife holding a dead baby and, unbeknownst to him, his wife had had a stillborn child.

***Though I must go, endure not yet: He's got a talent for tragic writing this way; he uses short syllables so we have to read slowly.

****As stiff twin compasses are two . . . To move, but doth, if th'other do: A lone image in poetry. Donne was pretty good with his imagery: lovers' eyeballs threaded on a string; love as a battering ram; a flea his favourite metaphor for fucking.