Will I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day

Introduction

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" displays many features affiliated with seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry in general, and with Donne's work in particular. Donne's up to date, the English writer Izaak Walton, notifies us the verse designated days from 1611, when Donne, about to journey to France and Germany, composed for his wife this valediction, or farewell speech. Like most poetry of Donne's time, it did not appear in publish throughout the poet's lifetime. The poem was first released in 1633, two years after Donne's death, in a assemblage of his verses called Songs and Sonnets. Even throughout his life, however, Donne's verse became well known because it distributed personally in manuscript and handwritten copies among literate Londoners.

The poem tenderly touches upon the speaker's admirer at their temporary parting, asking that they distinct serenely and serenely, without tears or protests. The speaker supports the desirability of such calmness by developing the ways in which the two share a holy love, both sexual and religious in nature. Donne's commemoration of earthly love in this way has often been mentioned to as the "religion of love," a key characteristic of numerous other famous Donne verses, such as "The Canonization" and The Ecstasy. Donne delicacies their love as sacred, elevated overhead that of ordinary earthly lovers. He contends that because of the self-assurance their love gives them, they are powerful sufficient to tolerate a temporary separation. In detail, he discovers ways of proposing, through metaphysical conceit, that the two of them either own a single soul and so can never actually be split up, or have twin spirits lastingly attached to each other. A metaphysical conceit is an extended metaphor or simile in which the bard sketches an ingenious evaluation between two very different objects. "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" finishes with one of Donne's most well known metaphysical conceits, in which he contends for the lovers' closeness by matching their two spirits to the feet of a drawing compass—a simile that would not normally happen to a poet composing about his love!

Argument

Donne's basic argument is that most people's relationships are built on purely sensual things but the love between him and his lover is different - it is something deeper, a "love of the mind" rather than a "love of the body". This love, he says, can endure even though the lovers cannot be physically close to each other ...