by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: August 21, 2008   Last Updated: January 24, 2009

John Donne's biographer Izaak Walton reports that Donne wrote this poem to his wife Anne in 1611 before leaving for France for a period of two months. Anne was pregnant at the time and had a premonition of impending tragedy, which proved to be correct. The child was born dead. According to Walton, while Donne was in France he had a vision of his wife walking across the bedroom with a dead infant in her arms.

A valediction is a farewell message. Since the title forbids his wife from sorrowing over their separation, the poet decides to present reasons why his embassy to France will not occasion grief or anxiety. He accomplishes this through a series of conceits - similes and strikingly unusual metaphors.

The first two quatrains can be misleading since they discuss the way virtuous men die. However, the deaths referred to are a figurative element of a simile and not a literal reference to the poet's death. Virtuous men have led lives that make their death something to be welcomed rather than feared. Donne's message is "Let our parting from each other be as quiet and imperceptible as the departure of the souls from the bodies of the virtuous, for whom heavenly bliss is expected and deserved."

His prohibition against "tear-floods" and "sigh-tempests" refers to Donne's earlier poem Of Weeping, where we find "Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow/ This world. . .." And further on "Since thou and I sigh one another's breath/ Whoe'r sighs most, is cruelest, and hastes the other's death." Hyperbole (figures of speech involving wild exaggeration) was a hallmark of poetry of the courtly love tradition. Donne is poking fun at the idea that one could shed tears sufficient to cause a flood or sigh so deeply that the atmospheric disturbance would cause a storm or hurricane.

The second quatrain's conclusion "'Twere profanation of our joys/ To tell the laity our love" makes a distinction between true lovers who are ordained members of a priesthood and ordinary lovers who are members of the congregation (laity) and not of the clergy. He made the same distinction in Of the Book, saying that "love's clergy" speak a language that is incomprehensible to the laity. His term "profanation" means granting admittance of the unworthy into the shrine reserved for priests and priestesses of love.

Switching to another metaphor, the poet describes how "Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears." However, a mere earthquake is minuscule compared to movement of the heavenly spheres, which ordinary

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