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“Valediction” doesn’t have a specific, concrete setting. That said, we can make some educated inferences about where the poem takes place. For one thing, we can reasonably infer that the speaker’s address to his lover occurs in a domestic setting. It might even take place in some threshold space, like a doorway or a courtyard, both of which are appropriate places for parting ways with a loved one. Indeed, the notion of the threshold is symbolically significant in Donne’s poem. In the opening stanzas, for instance, the speaker compares himself, standing on the threshold of departure, to anonymous “virtuous men,” who stand on the threshold of death. As these references to threshold spaces suggest, the true “setting” of the poem is more abstract in nature. Furthermore, the setting must be linked to the cosmological references that appear in the poem. These references derive from the Greek polymath Ptolemy, who believed the universe consisted of a set of nested spheres. Earth stood at the heart of this universe, surrounded by a series of spheres that grew increasingly perfect and unchanging the further they got from the base and corruptible center. It is within this vast cosmological scheme that the poem plays out.

Next section Themes

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