The poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," by John Donne, is one of my
favorite poems. It's a very complex poem, and that's in part because it's a
good example of what we call metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical
poetry is a genre of poetry that was very popular in the 17th
century. So our poem dates from roughly 1611
or 1612. Metaphysical poetry then stems from the 17th century and tends to be very
philosophical or intellectual. It does have a kind of colloquial or
conversational tone to it, and it often uses what are called "conceits."
Conceits are these startling metaphors metaphors or analogies that
shock and surprise. And this poem is full of them. So let's start
with the title then, and this word "valediction" here means "farewell" -- means to
say farewell to somebody. The basic idea of this poem is that John Donne is
leaving. He's going on a journey and he's saying to his wife,
"Farewell. Please don't cry for me. Don't be too emotional. I'm gonna be back soon.
I'll be faithful, you be faithful to me, and we'll be connected." So the big idea
here is that even though our bodies are going to be separate, our spirits are
going to remain connected. And that's really what this poem is about. Now, the
first two stanzas here start with a simile: "as" this, so "that." You really
have to read these two stanzas together, and the first one is talking about how
good people die. The basic idea here is that good people
die peacefully ... and in the same way that
good people die peacefully, so we should separate without a show of emotion.
In the same way let us not show too much emotion. Let's
just separate peacefully. So we read, "as virtuous men pass mildly away" -- and this
is a kind of euphemism already. It's a nice way of saying it. People die, but
they they die so peacefully it's nothing to shock you. [Continues reading:] "and whisper to their souls
to go." So where are these souls going? Well they're going to heaven. The
idea is that good people really don't mind dying because they know that the
afterlife will be good for them. They almost encourage their souls to
leave their bodies. Now around the bed of these people who are dying
we have these sad friends, these friends who are saying, "is this person dead
already?" "The breath goes now," some people
say. "I think he's dead -- he has died." And some say "No, no, he's still alive. I can
tell that he's still breathing." But the transition from living to dying to being
dead is so peaceful that you can hardly notice it. You can sort of imagine
them all standing around and saying "I think he's dead ...
no he's still alive." There's something very beautiful about this stanza and the
way in which the poetry brings out the effect here is through something that we
refer to as a kind of sibilant sound. So sibilants are sounds that typically have
lots of s's or sh's. We associate hissing especially with sibilants. If you
listen to this you can hear the whispering: "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." You hear that right? It's actually really
remarkable all those s's in these lines. So then we move to the next stanza
here and it says, "So let us melt." Iin the same way we are going to depart from
each other peacefully. Now I should say one more thing about this notion of
breath actually before we move on. "Breath" here I think in many ways is
synonymous for the soul, and if you think of the book of Genesis -- the creation of
mankind -- we read in Genesis 2:7, "Then the Lord God formed man from the
dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man
became a living being." So "breath" here really stands for more than just a kind
of physiological thing -- it's really about the soul, the spirit, which leaves the
body. Now the word "melt" here is very
poetic, because if we think of, for instance, a solid turning into a liquid ...
the two things are still connected to each other.
There's a change, but it's not as if we're dealing with something totally new.
Separation never changes the reality or the substance of the
relationship. And this idea of melting is also going to connect
with some of the ideas about alchemy later in the poem. There's a reference to
something being refined. There's a reference to gold, which is really
central to alchemy. So keep that in mind that a lot of these metaphors are
connected throughout the poem. He says, "and make no noise, no tear floods nor
sigh tempests moove." This is very dramatic language, but it's kind of
saying "don't cry me a river ... don't sigh quite so much. Just
don't show on the outside what you're feeling on the inside." And as he goes on
he turns this into a kind of religious metaphor.
So profanation here means a kind of blasphemy, a kind of desecration, and you
can think of this as making something unholy. The word profane is usually seen
as the opposite of "holy." So "'twere a profanation of our joys" -- if our joys are
so special, if our love is so spiritual -- a kind of spiritual love -- then it
would be a desecration of this special relationship that we have
to tell other people how much we love each other. And the "laity" here ... in church
language the laity are the common people. These are the people in the pew as
opposed to the priests or the clergy who know more. This is very
much a reminder that in the 17th century there was still this battle going on
between Catholics and Protestants, and what's fascinating here is that
Protestants tended to say that there there shouldn't be a separation between
the laity and the clergy. Protestants talked about this concept of the
"priesthood of all believers," this notion that everyone is in a sense a priest.
Everybody's on the same level and can have access to God directly. You don't
need a priest to do certain things for you. Now you still need clergymen
obviously, you need people to to be in in the office of let's say a minister, but
the priesthood of all believers is a kind of notion about democracy [or rather equality] within
the church. So what he's saying then is that well actually when it comes to love
this is almost more of a Catholic sense of love. This is that notion that our
love is so spiritual and it can only be administered by a very elite
class of people. There's an elitism to this love. We are like priests -- we know
what's is really going on and we're not going to show on the outside to other
people what our love is really about, because that would be to make it profane.
As you read on, and now that you're aware of this distinction between the
Catholics and the Protestants and this this bigger issue going on, you may also
want to think about a paradox in this poem. It's a really fascinating paradox I
think. So a paradox is where we have something that doesn't seem to make
sense, that seems contradictory on the surface, and yet when we think about it
more clearly it does somehow have some truth to it. Now this paradox has to do
with images ... because as we said, John Donne uses
many conceits, many metaphors, but images are always concrete. They are
concrete, they are visual, they appeal to the senses. And what John Donne is
saying in the poem is, well, we don't need our senses quite so much. Our love is
spiritual. So the paradox in this poem is this: why does John Donne use so many
images to indicate that his love transcends images, that it transcends the
physical and the body and all of these kinds of things. That's very paradoxical,
and that relates to another aspect of the struggle between Catholics and
Protestants. This is what we refer to as iconoclasm. Okay, so what is
iconoclasm? Well, iconoclasm is the attempt to destroy images, and
Protestants during this period often wanted to get rid of Catholic
statuary, and paintings, and other forms of imagery, because what the Protestants
were saying was that all you need is the Word [the Bible + preaching]. So we value the Word of God, the
gospel, and we don't need images to teach us how to how to access God, because that
becomes a kind of idol worship. So images versus the word -- we have this kind
of tension within the religious debates of the time period. If we think then
about the poem as a whole, where is John Donne standing with this? Is he saying,
"Well, I'm not so much an iconoclast because I love imagery and I love to use
all of these these metaphors and conceits"? Is he perhaps saying, "If you
need these images then you're like the laity, but if you're like me maybe you
don't"? Or is he actually kind of ironically saying, "Hey, our love is
spiritual, and it's special, and it doesn't need these images, and yet I
can't really go without them. The body is still important. It's just that we have
to transcend it somehow." So, some really fascinating questions, and
we only just talked about the opening two stanzas, but I hope you can start to
see that this poem has a lot to offer. We'll talk in some other videos about
the rest of the poem, but I hope for now you get a little bit of an introduction
as to what's at stake.