Analysis

John Donne uses imagery and metaphors throughout “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” to describe the speaker’s feelings for his/her lover. The speaker indicates that he must be separated from his lover but tries to comfort him/her by saying their relationship will still survive because their love is beyond physicality. Donne uses images such as the sea, gold, and a compass to describe the love that the speaker and his partner share. Although the speaker is going away, their love will not waiver. The speaker describes his/her relationship with their lover as being pure and above mortality.

One of the main comparisons that Donne uses in his poem is a compass. He uses this to exemplify that if his lover stays strong at a central point, they will be always connected regardless of how far away he travels. The fact that a compass creates a perfect circle also brings to mind things such as perfection, purity, and endlessness. Their relationship is stable “As stiff twin compasses are two;” (26). Without each other’s stability both would be unstable.

If one looks closely at the circle a compass creates, there is a dot in the middle from the pointed anchor. A circle with a central point is the symbol for gold in alchemy (pg. 199). Gold is associated with currency, value, and purity; something that the speaker is trying to explain to his/her lover. Gold is also extremely malleable and the speaker uses this to show that “Though (he) must go, endure not yet/A breach, but an expansion,/Like gold to airy thinness beat” (22-24). Gold can be flattened into extraordinarily thin sheets, which the speaker is comparing their love spreading out and covering the distance between them.

John Donne uses things that make one think of perfection, the circle and gold, to explain and show the speakers emotions toward their lover. The structure of the compass, the purity of the gold, and the perfection of the circle bring together three very strong characteristics of love that the speaker clearly feels with his lover. By exemplifying his/her love with objects that carry such strong associations with flawlessness, the speaker can only try show the reader how pure and special the love that they share with their lover is.