Spiritual Love

In “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” Donne describes an eternal spiritual love that exceeds physical between a husband and wife. The first stanzas in the poem depicting death as a separation on body and soul, the dying mans acceptance of his soul moving onto eternity, yet the denial of loved ones that his time on earth is done. The next stanza compares the need for acceptance of physical separation to the acceptance of a man accepting his separation of body and soul when facing death.
          The beauty of the special bond shared by husband and wife cannot be cheapened by a physical separation: “Dull sublunary lovers’ love . . .Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it” (13 – 16). Donne reinforces this special love again in the following stanza illustrates a “refined love” that is beyond comprehension, shared through the mind and goes beyond the need to be together physically. The ultimate love describes the physical separation as “not a breach, but an expansion” (23) and creates a desire within the reader to long for such perfect love.
            Donne’s illustration of their love in comparison to the compass creates a metaphor depicting once again the perfectness of the love, the completeness of the husband and wife. The picture of the solid foot of a compass firmly planted in the center conveys the wife remaining at the center (the home) that creates the perfect circle that completes him the perfect circle from beginning to end.
            Never being a fan of poetry, the discovery of meaning held within “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” was genuinely an inspiring and beautiful poem.