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John Donne
John Donne
The poet John Donne is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, that included George Herbert and Andrew Marvell...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Farewells
Before the Deployment
by Jehanne Dubrow
Chicago
by Carl Sandburg
Farewell
by John Clare
Farewell to Yang, Who's Leaving for Kuo-chou
by Wang Wei
Good Night
by Wilhelm Müller
Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye
by Gerald Stern
Losing Track
by Denise Levertov
Remember
by Christina Rossetti
Since Hannah Moved Away
by Judith Viorst
So Long
by Walt Whitman
Verses upon the Burning of our House
by Anne Bradstreet
When We Two Parted
by George Gordon Byron
Related Prose
Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? [excerpt]
by Kenneth Koch
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A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

 
by John Donne

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 the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the 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.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured 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 the other do;

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.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.



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