As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; ‘Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined, That our selves know not what it is, Inter-assured of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
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.
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
Our reason distinguishes us from the animals and grants us the ability to love rather than commit our lives to a bleak and endless expanse of pleasure-seeking. We can choose to die to self and can dedicate our lives to the service of others. However, John Donne recognized that our love is, like everything we are and do, imperfect.The highest form of human love lumbers gracelessly among the lowest ranks of angels but soars higher by far than the most steadfast of swans. Even as we make that vow to put someone else’s ultimate good before our own, we know that we are fallen. We will falter in that promise many times along the way, and will have to continually redirect our path back to genuine love above self-interest.
Future Reunion
John Donne, an Anglican pastor, was writing from the understanding of the human person as a union of body and soul. The first part of the poem therefore unfolds the simile of the separation of soul and body at death, comparing this to the parting of the lovers.As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; ‘Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love.
The virtuous man is not afraid of death, but greets it calmly and even encourages his soul to undertake its journey. His passing is so untroubled that there is no sign of disturbance to signal to his friends that he has gone.The verb “melt” introduces yet another comparison with a change in physical state. Alchemy was widely practiced at the time, and alchemists believed that by extracting the spirit of a metal they could turn it to gold. Alchemy, therefore, served as a metaphor for the resurrection of the body: through its death, the metal was “resurrected” as gold. Thus, both alchemy and the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body serve as examples of two things that are separated, but since they are two parts of the same whole, they are never truly separated at all.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.
The third stanza is built upon a Ptolemaic understanding of the universe with a series of concentric spheres revolving around the earth. Men are troubled by the movement of the earth, but the “trepidation of the spheres,” which is a far larger motion, doesn’t phase them because they don’t perceive it. In Ptolemy’s understanding, “trepidation” was the oscillation of these spheres in their usual course. Though it was on a larger scale, only the learned understood or perceived this trepidation, just as the laity could not understand the speaker’s love.But we by a love so much refined, That our selves know not what it is, Inter-assured of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
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.
The speaker and his beloved, on the other hand, have a greater love in which physical absence is like the movement of the spheres: it leaves no sign of a disturbance. Their love, going back to the analogy of alchemy, is refined and made greater through the separation. The sublunary love has no spiritual component to be removed, and so it cannot be turned to gold. On the other hand, the intellectual and spiritual bond in the speaker’s love mean that, as in the separation of metal and spirit in alchemy, the elements of that love become greater than they were before through the separation.Two Compasses
If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
In his famous image of the compasses, Donne demonstrates how the two souls are never truly parted at all. The movement of either foot is the movement of the other, and thus the image accomplishes the purpose of the congé d’amour, which is to bid the beloved farewell and console her by saying they were not two but one.
In the last two stanzas, Donne would seem to contradict himself, for the word “roam” implies that the motion of one foot is spiraling outwards, but the word “circle” would imply that the compass is tracing that symbol of perfection and eternity.
In fact, both are true at once: The movement of the compass represents the perfect, divine love belonging to the spiritual realm and the linear movement through time that makes us different from the angels. Though Donne’s love shares something of the divine, it cannot be represented by an image of perfection. Instead, he must use the image of a spiral, extending outward until it reaches its maximum radius and then arriving back where it started.
John Freccero, Professor Emeritus of Italian Literature at New York University, writes, “The beginning of the poem states the relationship of the lover to his beloved in terms of the union of body and soul. The end of the poem traces the emblem of that union, the geometric image of a soul that cannot be perfect while it remains disembodied.” He goes on to say, “Together, these two movements comprise the dynamism of humanity. With its whirling motion, the compass synthesizes the linear extension of time and space with the circularity of eternity.”
Reunion of Lover and Beloved
The form of the poem is itself a reflection of the reunion of the lover and his beloved. Firstly, the conceit itself, the union of two seemingly distant and unrelated subjects, is a reflection of this event. Secondly, the poem is 36 lines; an astronomical theory at the time held that all the planets would return to their original starting positions after 36,000 years, and this event would coincide with the resurrection of the body. The number also references the 360 degrees of the circle traced by the compass before the roaming foot returns back to where it began.Finally, the poet ends his poem where he began, as he says in the last line. The word “obliquely,” as Freccero points out, has often been applied to planetary motion, and the word “just” brings us back to the virtuous men in the first stanza.
The truth which Donne impresses upon us is that this reunion is not guaranteed. The lover and beloved in the poem have a proper understanding of human nature and love: He can tell her not to mourn because they understand that love cannot be separated into its various components, but is rather a hylomorphic union, as is the human person. Human love is not exclusively intellectual, spiritual, or physical, just as the human person is body, mind, and spirit in one unified whole.
Moreover, the comfort of the beloved is at the heart of the poem. The entire purpose of the speech is to console the beloved and to lessen her suffering inasmuch as possible. As the true mark of authentic love, the thought of the other’s good is uppermost, and the speaker’s integrity lies in his eventual return to his beloved, lest he be divided against himself.
