A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
By John Donne
As virtuous men pass milding away,
And whisper to their souls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and so say, no:
So let us melt, amd make no noise,
No tear-floods, no 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,
Through greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absesce, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refined,
That ourselves 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 to 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.
