Whereas the riddle element of A Valediction: Of Weeping is truly a kind of intellectual puzzle, in Forbidding Mourning the reader must solve the conceits on an intellectual and emotional level. The opening death scene has as its point of comparison the quietness with which a good soul passes away. Implicit, however, is the suggestion that the lovers’ parting is as serious a matter as death. This works upon the reader almost subliminally as he or she decodes the conceit for its more ostensible meaning. Stanza three suggests, again implicitly, that their parting is far more serious than an earthquake, and, indeed, equal in disruption to an unimaginably vast cosmic oscillation. By forbidding the open expression of grief (the ‘tear-floods’ and ‘sigh-tempests’ which were precisely the raw material of A Valediction: Of Weeping ) Forbidding Mourning manages to suggest a new profundity of feeling which cannot be expressed in words or actions, or even be understood by those who experience it: ‘a love, so much refin’d,/That ourselves know not what it is.’ This feeling is best expressed in the poem by the delightful image of the compasses. Comparing the separated lovers to the two arms of a divider, the speaker suggests that they are united and interdependent in every possible intention and action; an idea reinforced by the humanising of the compasses by expressions such as ‘leans and hearkens.’

This is the second great theme of the poem: that the lovers are so totally one that they might as well be physically joined, as are the two arms of the compasses, or as is gold leaf ‘to airy thinness beat.’ The depth of emotion suggested by the first half of the poem allows the speaker to assert that two can become one with a confidence that seems lacking by comparison in The Good-Morrow . There is a new neatness and certainty in ‘Our two souls therefore, which are one’ that is supported by the depth of the images that make up the rest of the poem, and the deftness and balance of Donne’s versification. The lovers are ‘Inter-assured’ of each other, and so is the reader. The final twist of the compasses conceit provides an emblem of this unity in the circle which is drawn in our minds, symbol of perfection and eternity. It is a fitting conclusion to a poem which has continually sought analogies that are beyond our earth-bound lives: a saintly death opens the poem; then the speaker places his own love beyond the Sphere of the Moon among the perfect outer planets and stars; his love is also beyond human sense and understanding – concepts often used of God Himself.