Because of the comparison to death and natural disasters we know that separation is sometimes uncontrollable. Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears, Dull sublunary lovers’ love The results were strange, comparing unlikely things, such as lovers to a compass or the soul to a drop of dew. The poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and comparisons, each describing a way of looking at their separation that will help them to avoid the mourning forbidden by the poem’s title. The word ‘meta’ means ‘after,’ so the translation of ‘metaphysical’ is ‘after the physical.’ Metaphysics deals with questions that can’t be explained by science, and explores the nature of reality in a philosophical way. A Valediction Forbidding Mourning Stanza 4. ‘Valediction’ means parting or farewell. Stanza 4. Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. The poem appreciates the beauty of spiritual love. But our love’s different: it’s so refined and subtle that we don’t fully understand its constitution ourselves, and it’s based on a meeting of minds as well as bodies, so we don’t care as much to be apart from each other physically, and be unable to see and touch each other’s eyes, lips, and hands. One of the great ‘goodbye’ poems in the English language, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ is, in a sense, not a farewell poem at all, since Donne’s speaker reassures his addressee that their parting is no ‘goodbye’, not really. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. He says, they should leave without “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,” for to publicly announce their feelings in such a way would profane their love. For all the eroticism in poems such as The Flea, Donne professes a spiritual devotion that transcends physical love. 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. Other couples, who are bonded physically but don’t have this deeper spiritual connection, couldn’t bear to be physically apart like that. Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show The voice is that of the poet, using the first person ‘I’ and addressing his young wife who, characteristically, is a passive subject; she is allowed no voice of her own. 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. 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. So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move. If you found this short analysis of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ useful, you might also enjoy our thoughts on his poem ‘The Canonization’, his classic poem ‘The Ecstasy’, and our discussion of his ‘A Hymn to God the Father’.