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The Pain of Parting

The poem’s central theme, and the one that motivates the speaker’s address to his lover, relates to the pain of parting. The opening stanzas introduce this theme by drawing out an elaborate simile that compares the speaker’s impending departure to death. Ostensibly, the speaker makes this comparison to avoid drama with his lover. He tries to calm her by saying they should part as painlessly as “virtuous men” (line 1), who die so peacefully that those around them can’t determine the precise moment of their passing. Despite the callous humor at work in this opening simile, the comparison does register that parting is indeed painful. And not just painful, but infused with a melancholy specter of death. Every separation comes with the implicit risk that the parting pair may never see each other again. This possibility infuses the moment of departure with existential dread, which Donne explicitly recognizes in the poem’s full title, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Upon his farewell, the speaker forbids his lover from prematurely mourning his death. This prohibition is likely as much to protect himself from the pain of parting as it is to spare his lover.

The Spiritual Unity of Love

At the heart of the speaker’s address is a notion that love, at its most refined, is a matter of spiritual rather than physical unity. The speaker is quick to dismiss what he calls “dull sublunary lovers’ love” (line 13)—that is, love that’s earthly, impure, and dependent on physical intimacy. The speaker insists that the “soul” of this type of love “is sense” (line 14), where the term sense relates to sensuousness and to perception through the bodily senses. If this is a lesser form of love, it’s because “absence . . . doth remove / Those things which elemented it” (lines 15–16). In other words, “sublunary” love can’t sustain itself without the immediate presence of the two lovers. By contrast, the speaker insists that he and his lover share a connection that’s “so much refined / That our selves know not what it is” (lines 17–18). This is a form of love that, in its refinement, is of the spirit rather than the body. Lovers who possess this more spiritual form of love enjoy a form of unity that persists across physical distances. As the speaker puts it: “Our two souls . . . are one” (line 21).

The Transcendence of the Body

Closely connected to the spiritual unity of love is a secondary theme related to the spirit’s transcendence of the body. The speaker spends the first two-thirds of the poem making a general argument against embodiment. When the speaker asks his lover to avoid excessive sentiment, he likens emotional expression to the physical destructiveness of natural disasters (lines 5–6):

     So let us melt, and make no noise,
        No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move

Instead of allowing “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” to move the body into emotional hysterics, the speaker invites his lover to “melt” away, avoiding embodied reaction altogether. Likewise, when the speaker mocks what he calls “dull sublunary lovers’ love” in line 13, he’s dismissing the physical expression of love. In its stead, he announces his preference for a spiritualized form of love that is decidedly disembodied (lines 21–24):

     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.

Here, the speaker reframes the “breach” of separation as a form of “expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat.” This image of a material form being transformed into something “airy” powerfully captures the speaker’s desire to transcend the body. That fact that it’s gold that becomes airy is also significant, since in alchemy gold represents the purity of spirit. The speaker is thus advocating for transcending the body in pursuit of greater spiritual purity.

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