A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, by John Donne

‘Therefore, although I must physically leave you,

our souls don’t feel there’s any distance between us:

it feels more like an expansion,

much as when gold is beaten out into thin sheets

so it covers a greater area.




Or it’s like a pair of compasses,

where you are the one in the center

and I the one which circles it:

you stay on the same spot,

yet you still move, since you revolve

as I move around the perimeter.

(What’s more, the compasses are two in that they’re a pair,

but they’re really one, since they comprise the same one instrument.)




So this is how you will be to me,

as I move away from you:

you will remain here but move aslant in line with the direction I travel.

You remaining here enables me to travel in a perfect circle,

ensuring that I’ll end up right back here where I departed from –

back with you.’




Explanation of the poem ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, by John Donne