Make Up Blog: John Donne

In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, the narrator first describes how honorable men die; silently. He then uses this as a metaphor to how they should say goodbye as lovers parting. This moves on to a metaphor between the "innocent" trepidations in the center of the earth that are far greater than the movement of an earthquake and the love between him and his lover. Like these innocent but massive large quakes, their great love should not cause a lot of commotion when they say goodbye. It is easy to tell this poem among Donne's other poems by this beading of metaphors to describe things such as emotion. This is a classic example of metaphysical poetry which was popular at the time.