Wednesday, September 14, 2011

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne - Mixed Feelings

I'm having trouble understanding what this poem is about. But I'm going to jump into the water and say what I connections I see. The first words I latched onto were, "Moving of the' earth brings harms and fears." Being a physics guy, this made me start thinking of the sun and the moon. I see that those two are the "lovers" the speaker refers to. The virtuous men are the planets and asteroids that orbit the sun. The earth causes fear during a lunar eclipse when the two lovers can't see each other. The sun is "in the center sit" and the moon is "the other far doth roam." The moon "leans, and hearkens after it." While this seems a stretch to some, I find it as perfectly logical and it means more to me since I am interested in physics - which deals with such objects.

One final note: "And makes me end, where I begun," refers to the Big Crunch. We started with the Big Bang and will end in the same point from which we were made - through the Big Crunch.

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