John Donnes Valediction: Forbidding Mourning - Book Report/Review Example

John Donne's Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and Andrew Marvell's The Definition of Love John Donne's Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and Andrew Marvell's The Definition of Love both make extensive use of the metaphysical conceit, "a comparison, often elaborate, extended, or startling, between objects which are apparently dissimilar" (Beckson and Ganz 45). Donne and Marvell both draw upon ancient tradition to describe true love, not as a physical relationship, but as a spiritual union, inviting a comparison between the ultimate poles of spirit and matter. Love is explained by likening it to the most unlikely concepts: to death at home in bed, to the legs of a compass, and to parallel lines that can never meet. Exploiting the duality between spiritual love has a Neoplatonic cast in the early seventeenth century when the dominant philosophy was still that of the Renaissance rather than that of the Enlightenment (Yates). Marvell undoubtedly reacts to Donne's work, perhaps in a satirical fashion. Smith, in the notes to his edition of Donne (405), refers to the 1640 biography of the poet by Izaak Walton the claim that Donne wrote the Valediction as addressed to his wife on the occasion of a trip to France in 1611 that enforced a lengthy separation of the couple, though without giving the account much probability. In any case, it was occasioned by some kind of parting, as the title Valediction demonstrates. But the poem does not merely address that or any particular relationship so much as treating love in the broadest terms. The first stanza begins a lengthy metaphor describing how the soul may leave the body at death with such subtlety that those in attendance on the sick bed cannot tell at what moment life ended. In the second stanza, Donne advises his lover to show no more outward sign of the interrupted course of their love than that undetectable change between life and death. Donne refers to those who are insufficiently subtle to notice such a distinction as the "laity" (l. 8). This metaphor casts their love as a religious secret known only to the lovers as its priesthood, which would be profaned if outwardly revealed by signs of mourning at the absence of the beloved. The third stanza makes clear the relationship between the lesser and the greater of the two terms of the simile between the detection of death and love. Death is like an earthquake, publicly bewailed and queried as an omen. But love is like the infinitely greater movement of the heavenly sphere which the public does not search for meaning. This is a very difficult passage. In view of the prevailing belief in astrology in Donne's lifetime (Shumaker 1-41), one might rather expect the stars to be looked to as bringers of "harms and fears" (l. 9), to have their meaning reckoned, and to be anything but innocent. However much Christianity or rational skepticism might deny the validity of divination, the motion of the stars and particularly astrology, were far more prominent than earthquakes as evil portents in the popular imagination and in literary tradition. Donne makes earthquakes the subject of interrogation for meaning, a very clear acceptance of their status as omina within a system of divination. So why are the planetary spheres and their system of astrology different; how are they 'innocent" (l. 12) Given the early date of Donne's life, one can hardly appeal to the new astronomical science of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo that slowly separated astronomy from astrology, as the basis of Donne's conceit. The only way out seems to be an appeal to skepticism about astrology prominent in influential ancient authors like Cicero (On Divination 2.41.87-47.99) and Augustine (Confessions, 4.3.4; 7.5.7-7.11). In this case Donne's conceit could be that disbelief is more refined than the common belief, and skepticism stands for the secret wisdom of Donne's love. Or, perhaps the point is that profane love is no more like spiritual love than an earthquake is like celestial mechanics. In the fourth and fifth stanzas (ll. 13-20), Donne extends the comparison between the two kinds of lovers "Dull sublunary lovers" (l. 13; that is, those confined below the sphere of the moon in pre-scientific astronomy) are necessarily material and know love as a series of physical sensations which cease when the lovers are apart. Donne and his lover participate in the supra-lunary world of spiritual existence, and so their love does not depend on physical contact and is indifferent to separation. In the sixth stanza, while the lovers' bodies are separated, they expand "Like gold to aery thinness beat" (l. 34) to remain in contact with each other. This is a Neoplatonic idea in that since the soul is, from the viewpoint of matter, infinite in extent (Blumenthal 83-84), the lovers' souls infinitely overlap and so cannot be separated: "Our two souls, therefore, which are one" (l. 21). The final three stanzas take a new metaphysical conceit, and a more humorous one, describing the union of the two souls as the legs of a geometrical compass which, though separated, are nevertheless also joined and move together. In summary, common love is like mourning, like the violent motion of an earthquake and depends on intimate physical sensation, while the union between Donne and his lover is like the quiet release of death, like the mathematical perfection of celestial mechanics, and, as an afterthought to this, like the joined but separable legs of a compass. Marvell's The Definition of Love is unusually dense in its intertextual references to earlier authors (Davison). Its indebtedness to Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning is usually taken for granted, especially in regard to its striking metaphysical conceits (Ray 52). It could well be taken as a satire of Donne's work since, while Donne addresses the predicament of separated lovers, Marvell speaks of two lovers who have never even been allowed to meet or come to know of each other. Marvell also tends to move Donne's conceits in the direction of reductio ad absurdum. For instance, Donne's metaphor of the compass, which represents the two lovers separated but nevertheless joined in the overall structure of the instrument, becomes a metaphor of the lovers as two parallel lines which, "Though infinite, can never meet" (l. 28). In the same way, the 'definition' of the title was a newly coined technical term in the early seventeenth century with a sense more strongly suggesting delimiting or separating (Davison 581), so Marvell's poem is not like Donne's about the quiet tragedy of lovers forced apart for a time, but about an unrequited love that is eternally frustrated by the absolute separation of the lovers. Marvell also reinterprets other of Donne's conceits. Donne's likening of two kinds of love to an earthquake and the planetary spheres is echoes in Marvell's fifth stanza: Unless the giddy Heaven fall, And Earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the World should all Be cramped into a planisphere (ll. 25-28). Here the planets and the earth collapse together to prevent the union of the lovers, producing a planisphere, a map of either the earthly or heavenly spheres projected onto two joined flat circles that are simultaneously linked and separated like a compass. This exaggerated and compressed repetition of Donne's conceits seems like satire. Astrology is also restored to its more usual role as a mediator of fate keeping the lovers apart (l. 32). Other effects in Marvell's poems are merely comic; for example, Marvell and his lover's eternal separation by fate which "always crowds itself betwixt" (l. 12) like an inconvenient chaperon. Another possible target of satire in Marvell's poem is the idea of Platonic love (Kraye). The received conception of Platonic love in the Renaissance is presented in Castiglione's The Courtier, according to which a wiser man is supposed to love a young woman in a spiritual way completely empty of desire and to wish to increase her chastity and virtue. While in Platonic, love the lovers are not subject to desire, Marvell's lovers are rather doomed never to consummate their obvious desire, except through "the conjunction of the mind" (l. 31). The comic force is apparent in light of the usage of 'conjunction' to refer to intercourse in Marvell's environment (Ray 54). Marvell, moreover, suggests that the rejection of physical desire in Platonic love does not arise from the virtuous love of beauty, but is rather a case of 'sour grapes,' born of despair when hope of consummation is impossible: Maganimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing, Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown But vainly flapped its tinsel wing (ll. 5-8). According to Plato's own rather different conception of love in the Symposium (203b-c), personified Love is the child of Resource and Need. The beloved youth in Socrates' ideal relationship possesses the resource of beauty, of which the older lover stands in need, and which he can obtain in exchange for his wisdom. Marvell's love, on the other hand, "was begotten by Despair upon Impossibility" (ll. 3-4). While for Plato, then, the fulfillment of love is possible through the ritual of exchange between the lovers, leading to enlightenment, for Marvell it becomes impossible because the beloved cannot be so much as be approached, leading to despair. Donne and Marvell both talk about the problem of separated lovers with varying degrees of reference to the popular concept of Platonic love, cloaked in the extravagantly figurative language of the Metaphysical conceit. Donne couches his discussion within the possibility of an event from real life, the temporary spatial separation of lovers, perhaps even occasioned by his actual separation form his life. Marvell reacts to Donne's poem and pushes his concepts and conceits to their logical limits, dealing with lovers whom the hostility of the very cosmic forces of the universe ensure will and can never meet. Works Cited Augustine. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Beckson, Karl, and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. 3rd ed. New York: Noonday, 1989. Blumenthal, Henry J. "On Soul and Intellect." The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 82-104. Cicero. De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione. William Armistead Falconer, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927. Davison, Dennis. "Marvell's 'The Definition of Love.'" Review of English Studies n.s. 6.22 (1955): 141-46. Donne, John. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. John Donne: The Complete English Poems Ed. A. J. Smith. London: Penguin, 1986. 84-85. Kraye, Jill. "The Transformation of Platonic Love in the Italian Renaissance." The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader. Ed. Keith Whitlock. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. 81-87. Marvell, Andrew. The Definition of Love. The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950. Ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. 333-34. Plato. The Collected Dialogues Bollingen Series 71. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Ray, Robert H. An Andrew Marvell Companion. New York: Garland, 1998. Shumaker, Wayne A. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Yates, Frances A. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979. Read More