A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away while their friends argue over whether the breath has stopped, so the speaker asks that their own parting be made without tear floods or sigh tempests, since to publish grief would profane it. Dull sublunary lovers cannot survive absence because their love is built from precisely what absence removes; a love refined past that endures separation the way gold endures beating, into an airy thinness, or the way the fixed leg of a compass leans after the other and comes upright when it returns. Izaak Walton reports the lines were written for Donne's wife before he crossed to the Continent in 1611, and the compass is the most quoted conceit in English poetry.
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