A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Since Donne chose to frame the poem through the mechanism of the title, a formal farewell, and to immediately situate his readers in a setting of loss, it is poignant that the tone and subsequent content adopts a hopeful mode of consolation. Though this funeral scene is important in how it sets up the poet’s argument in the rest of the poem, because of the poem’s lyric mode, this initial scene is not meant to be read as a literal or material observation of the speaker. One can infer this from the lack of specificity in time, place, or person. Donne is not concerned with one external individual death and its corresponding memorial. Rather, Donne more abstractly and complexly addresses the scene of a memorial to console his lover and expand her thinking on how death and loss should be approached. Though the poem is widely read as a broad nod to the inevitability of death, some scholars have suggested that given the occasion of the poem’s original composition—Donne journeying the continent with Sir Robert Drury—that the separation of the lover and speaker can also be read as more temporary.