Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, August 22nd, 2004. Today's poem is from John Dunn. It is a valediction forbidding mourning. It wasn't so long ago that we featured this poem on the show, but it came to mind recently as I was preparing to record another poem for the daily poem, and it seemed only fitting that they be presented side by side. So today, a valediction, forbidding morning,

and then tomorrow, a poem that makes a nice sort of contrast or companion piece to it. So to find out

what that poem is, you'll have to tune back in. For now, here is John Dunn's A Validiction Forbidding Morning. I'll read it once, offer a few

comments, and then read it again.

As virtuous men pass mildly away

and whisper to their souls to go, whilst some of their sad

friends do say,

The breath goes now, and some say,

No.

So let us melt and make no noise.

No tear floods, nor sigh tempests move,

To our profanation of our joys to tell the laity our love. Moving of the earth brings harms and

fears men reckon what it did and meant, but trepidation of the spheres, though greater far, is

innocent. Dull sublunary lovers love, whose soul is sense, cannot admit absence because it doth remove those things which

elemented it. But we, by a love, so much refined, that ourselves know not what it is,

inter-assure it of the mind, careless eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls, therefore,

which are one, though I must go, endure not yet a

breach, but an expansion, like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are too so as

stiff twin compasses are two. Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth if the other do.

And though it in the center sit, it when the other far doth roam, it leans and harkens after it,

and grows erect as that comes home. Such will thou be to me who must, like the other foot,

obliquely run,

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