Donne and Ovid: Two Valedictory Poems in Relation to Metamorphoses 11. 410-748

Abstract

In an age when any long journey involved great danger, John Donne wrote several poems in which the speaker, about to depart on a voyage, bids his beloved farewell. Among them, ‘Song’ [‘Sweetest love, I do not goe’] in the Songs and Sonets concentrates on the sea voyage: the speaker, tenderly calming his mistress's apprehension, affirms a belief that their mutual love would never permit a total separation. The poem is often compared with ‘A Valediction: forbidding Mourning’, but the two are very different in their styles of persuasion: the naive reasoning of ‘Song’ is far removed from the sharply paradoxical philosophy of the other poem. Instead, I wish to suggest that ‘Song’ finds a more apposite counterpart in the elegy ‘On his Mistris’. The two poems are similar not only in their intensity of emotion and unphilosophical reasoning but in their shared connection with one episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses. This article traces in ‘Song’ and ‘On his Mistris’ parallels and echoes of the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone in Metamorphoses 11. 410-748, and argues that the Ovidian episode may be taken as the prototype of lovers’ separation on which Donne built his two seemingly very different valedictory poems. Such a use of Ovid indicates a deeper engagement with classical poetry than Donnean critics have usually assumed.