Poem of the Day: ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’

If we do not end exactly where we begin, still everything does come to a conclusion, and sometimes that’s near the place it started. All journeys need an ending. All circles long to close.

Today we publish the 500th Poem of the Day, the New York Sun feature column begun in 2022. And that 500th entry seems to mark a fitting moment to bring the project to an end. The poet Sally Thomas and I opened with the curiosity of Benjamin Franklin’s “February hath xxviii days” on February 28, 2002, and we close today, January 25, 2024, with John Donne’s 1612 “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Along the way, we published two weeks of war poetry, to commemorate the two Veterans Days that came during that two-year stretch, along with two weeks of Christmas poems. We did a fun week-long exploration of cowboy poetry, a week of Greek and Latin classical meters in English, and a week of hymns. A week of William Butler Yeats, a week of the contemporary poet Rhina P. Espaillat, and even a week of graduation poetry.

But mostly what we did, day in and day out, was present and comment on individual poems: reprinting any older poem that caught our eye or seemed fitting for the day (along with some contemporary poetry in traditional forms). In, say, 1920 or 1960, this daily looking back at the tradition of English poetry would have been an act of critical abdication or even cowardice, just reaching into the standard anthologies to grab easy and well-known verses. In the current cultural climate, however, the act of revisiting the tradition with sympathy seemed something almost revolutionary.

That’s because the present-day literary and artistic climate suffers from a terrible presentism: an ignorance of the past that congratulates itself for its ignorance — refusing, in the name of moral judgment, to learn much about what went before. The result has been a decades-long forgetting of the great or even just memorable lines of poetry that once formed a considerable portion of our shared cultural knowledge.

And it was to combat this that we gradually developed what became the standard form for The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day columns: four to eight paragraphs of introduction, locating the day’s selected poem in its historical and biographical setting while pointing out the forms and meters that made the poem interesting. With the 500th entry today, the Sun and its poetry editors have decided to wrap up the column, leaving open the possibility of reviving in some other form the past-centric project, seeking to demonstrate the power of formal verse.

So, for a final entry, today’s Poem of the Day is from John Donne. An exhortation about a lover’s impending departure, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” consists of nine quatrains of tetrameter lines, rhymed abab.

The poem contains wonderful examples of the metaphysical mode of constructing metaphors: The poet’s leaving for a trip is like dying. The distance between the lovers will be akin to the movements of celestial bodies in astronomy: “Our two souls therefore, which are one, / Though I must go, endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion” of the shared universe. The lovers are like the two legs of a drawing or measuring compass, with the loving traveler like the moving foot of the compass and the beloved homebody like the fixed leg: “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.”