Selected Poems by John Donne

‘What I will say, I will not tell thee now,/Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,/I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,/Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.’ – The final four lines provide a surprising twist in the poem’s logic. The speaker reveals that he no longer loves the woman who has rejected him, and so he will not divulge his most terrible secret to her, as this would, he argues, certainly cause her to change her mind. Instead, his motive is now, apparently, revealed as pure revenge: he reveals her future, and allows her no possibility to change it. How much of this is bluster depends on the reader’s own interpretation.

Language

Donne is particularly dramatic and portentous in his tone in this poem, as is appropriate given the theme. The word ‘dead’ is powerfully stressed at the end of line one, as is ‘ghost’ which follows on from the chain of th/f alliteration in ‘that thou thinkst thee free’ and the polysyllabic ‘solicitation’ in the preceding lines.

Assonance is used effectively in ‘thy sick taper will begin to wink’ which repeats the same i sound four times in quick succession, a chain which is continued effectively through ‘or pinch to wake him, think’ and which ends with the emphatic ‘shrink’ of line ten.

Structure

This poem is not divided into stanzas, and its verse form is quite irregular, in a manner which suits its dramatic nature, full of twists and turns of sense. The rhyme scheme is ABBABCDCDCEFFEGGG, which includes some recognisable features (such as the concluding triplet and the ABBA pattern) but does not provide much in the way of a clear pattern. Line lengths are similarly irregular (10-6-10-8-10-10-10-10-4-8-10-10-5-10-11-11-10) and suggest a poem much more dependent on feeling and disordered emotion than is usual in Donne.

A Valediction: forbidding mourning

In A Valediction: Of Weeping the conceits Donne uses tend to distance the reader from an emotion that could seem extravagant otherwise. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning , the intellectualised approach is the same, but he succeeds here in expressing deep emotion through his use of conceit, and such unromantic ideas as Ptolemaic cosmology and Euclidean geometry. Love is like a treasure semantically hidden within the conceits themselves, and, indeed, the whole point of A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning is to make deep feeling covert, like some religious secret denied to the multitude: ‘’Twere profanation of our joys/To tell the laity our love.’