Work Of The Day: Donne

Hello.
Bren here.
I realize I have been neglectful of my blog/twitter/facebook page. And recently, in my English Lit class, I've been exposed to all these great poets and writers. Chaucer, Mawlowe, Dunne. These are just a few. And I've been enlightened and inspired, and because of that I've been annoying everyone around me because it's all I'm talking about. So, I realized, why am I bombarding the people around me who don't appreciate the work as much as I do? Hello! I need to reach out to my fellow writers and literature lovers who are online!

So, I'd like to say I want to do a "Work of the day" (First off, I say "work" because it may be a poem, sonnet, play, or just a sentence) that inspires me and I want to share it. Also, I'm gonna try to do it everyday but between school, work, and everyday life, it might be once a week, maybe twice. We'll see.

And if the poem is hard to understand, please look it up and read more into it, because I promise you, it's worth it. Don't let the old language be a barrier to far greater things!

Here is a love poem that is way more than a love poem, and quite possibly, the best love poem.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

BY JOHN DONNE

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;

'Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' 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 our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, 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 two 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,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun.