Day 13: Thank You John Donne!

I came to the teaching of English with a formal background in journalism and communications; not with scholarly training in 17th century metaphysical poetry. I'm not very familiar with the work of British poet John Donne, and I definitely don't go near it with my freshman students. So, I found it interesting that in two separate instances yesterday I was presented a single poem by him, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning."

The first introduction took place during the final session of my week-long teacher conference. Using Donne's poem, the instructor presented a strategy for helping AP students deconstruct and analyze difficult text. Yes, 17th century metaphysical poetry is difficult text!

Then, last night I watched "Wit," a lovely movie written by Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols. In the film, Thompson plays a university professor and Donne scholar who is diagnosed with stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. The movie weaves her theoretical appreciation of Donne's favorite subjects--spirituality and death--with the realistic acceptance of her own mortality. As she says in the film, "There is no stage 5." In one scene, she recites part of the valediction poem from her hospital bed in the isolation unit.

Why do I go on about it now, this dense poem about romantic love and spiritual immortality? I do because in class today I found myself stiffening, tensing, and stewing over something that I could not let go. After the first 40 minutes, a word from the poem settled in my brain, and it alone helped me release. The word was EXPANSION. I realized the thought I was grasping so harshly could be pushed out if I allowed for expansion of my breath, my heart, and my resentful brain.

Donne's poem is in fact not about yoga (though the rhythm mimics the human heart beat). He wrote it as a reminder to his wife not to worry about him as he departed for a long journey. In the 1600s, travel was dangerous. He wanted to reassure her that their bond ascended the human world and the inevitablity of physical death. I'm not sure I can recall the last time I received a poem like that.....hmmmmm.

Here are the words he left her with in hopes of easing her heart:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," 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
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd 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 aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre 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.