Abstract
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning is one of John Donne’s most celebrated and most significant poems in which he declares, quite ingeniously, his ideal of spiritual love which transcends the ordinary and inferior love of others that is based on mere physicality. This essay applies New Historicism, a school of literary theory since the early 1980s, to Donne’s seventeenth-century poem. The study begins with elaborating on the major concepts and principles of New Historicism. Then, the historical, cultural and biographical circumstances that surrounded and motivated the composition of Donne’s poem are discussed. Finally, the discourses of religion, science, love, sexuality, space and time and the circulation of power implicit in the compass imagery, the metaphysical conceit used in this poem, are explored.
Highlights
New Historicism is an approach in literary theory that considers literary works as historical documents and cultural artifacts
This paper will discuss the historical and biographical circumstances that surrounded and motivated the composition of this poem and refer to earlier studies of the work. It will explore the discourses of religion, science, love, sexuality, space and time
VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2, DECEMBER 2010: 169-181 and the circulation of power implicit in the compass imagery used in this piece of literature
Summary
Forbidding Mourning was first published posthumously in 1633. It is a lyric poem written in nine four-line stanzas. The image presented in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning is the second type of circle which belongs to “this life” and is made with a “compass.” At the end of the poem, Donne writes that the stability of the fixed leg of the compass “makes me end where I begun” The discussion of love has focused entirely on the spiritual realm, souls divorced from their human bodies, but in Donne’s poem, the physical is surely present. The violence to which Freccero refers would, hypothetically, be the result of an erotic interpretation of these lines, the word “erect.” It is unclear what Freccero means by the “context:” the poem dates from a time when explicit sexual discourse was not uncommon: At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. As the title of the poem indicates, the woman must not mourn the departure of his man; she must instead be the pillar of strength which makes his safe return possible
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