A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Donne, 1633

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^o of the spheres,^o oscillation/heavenly 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.^o which were its elements

But we, by a love so much refined, 
   

That ourselves 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 centre 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.