Page When Donne departs, observers should see no sign from Donne’s wife to suggest whether Donne is near or far because she will be so steadfast in her love for him and will go about her business all the same. LET me pour forth My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here, For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, And by this mintage they are something worth. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne: Summary and Analysis A very well-known poem, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning is a metaphysical love poem by John Donne written in 1611 or 1612 and published in 1633 in the collection of 'Songs and Sonnets'. The two lines might suggest that watery reflections of the lovers are being created and destroyed endlessly: in reflecting, or mixing with, each other’s tears, the lovers “overflow” and destroy those reflections, the faces-within-tears from the first stanza. "John Donne: Poems “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” Summary and Analysis". And by this mintage they are something worth. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of John Donne's poetry. John Donne probably wrote “A Valediction: of Weeping” after he met his future wife, Ann More, and before he took holy orders and turned most of his authorial energies to sermons and spiritual meditations. The English writer and Anglican cleric John Donne is considered now to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time. This stanza’s transformation of a “nothing” into an “all” is similar to an idea expressed near the end of another Donne poem, “The Canonization.” Both poems use the figure of a world contained in a reflection, and in each case great stress is put on the metaphysical nature of that containment: the physical object is captured in a reflection, but so is the object’s essence. For thus they be
This poem is composed up of nine stanzas containing four lines in each stanza. Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath, On a round ball As his own tear falls, his beloved’s reflection falls with it. So while we could read this first stanza as the heartfelt cry of a lover in anguish, devastated to be separated from his beloved, it’s also possible to take these lines as the cynical complaint of a husband who feels persecuted in his role as breadwinner and, even worse, unsure of his wife’s fidelity. That’s not an original idea, but it becomes original when we note that in each case this union is destructive as well as creative. The poet is asking for his lover’s indulgence. So too in “A Valediction: of Weeping” the lovers are united—in teary reflections and in breath—but those very unions threaten the lovers with ruin. On the one hand, the clever figures and rhyme scheme remind us that the poem is an artificial construct of symbols and sounds. ‘Valediction’ means parting or farewell. In “The Canonization” the lovers are both flies and the candles that burn the flies, so they “at [their] own cost die”: the fact of their union is also the cause of their destruction.