John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

I am thinking of Jim Rigney (Robert Jordan) today, whom I never met, but who was Mike Ford's brother of the heart, and I'm thinking of Mike, who died a year ago, and I'm thinking of Elise because I love her and because surviving is hard.

And I'm thinking of John Donne, because I'm teaching him today, and because "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" has just come very close--because I'm thinking of Mike--to making me cry.

(scott_lynch has written a gorgeous and honest tribute to Robert Jordan and his work, which--as is so often the case with Scott--is very much what I would have liked to have said, only better articulated and more compassionate than I could hope to manage.)


A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
While 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 the 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-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 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 the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Dorothy Parker, as usual, for the win.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

--Dorothy Parker, "Comment"

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Yes, it's true, one of the things I use LiveJournal for is a sort of hypertexted, searchable commonplace book. I am tired of getting this little ditty half-stuck in my head, so that I can neither remember it nor stop trying to.

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In other news, I want to figure out how to do my hair like Djuna Barnes. Which may be the shallowest reaction to a literary figure I have ever had.