A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning Poem by John Donne

by
  1. As virtuous men pass mildly away,
  2. And whisper to their souls to go,
  3. Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
  4. “The breath goes now,” and some say, “No:”
  5. So let us melt, and make no noise,
  6. No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
  7. ‘Twere profanation of our joys
  8. To tell the laity our love.
  9. Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
  10. Men reckon what it did, and meant;
  11. But trepidation of the spheres,
  12. Though greater far, is innocent.
  13. Dull sublunary lovers’ love
  14. (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
  15. Absence, because it doth remove
  16. Those things which elemented it.
  17. But we by a love so much refined,
  18. That ourselves know not what it is,
  19. Inter-assurèd of the mind,
  20. Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.
  21. Our two souls therefore, which are one,
  22. Though I must go, endure not yet
  23. A breach, but an expansion,
  24. Like gold to airy thinness beat.
  25. If they be two, they are two so
  26. As stiff twin compasses are two;
  27. Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  28. To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
  29. And though it in the center sit,
  30. Yet when the other far doth roam,
  31. It leans, and hearkens after it,
  32. And grows erect, as that comes home.
  33. Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
  34. Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
  35. Thy firmness makes my circle just,
  36. And makes me end where I begun.