WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Does absence make the heart grow fonder? John Donne, our poet who believes so strongly in the united souls of lovers, asks himself what happens to this harmony when the lovers are separated. Join Erika Kyba for a reading and analysis of this epic love poem.

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading John Dunn's A Valediction, Forbidding Morning. In the last episode, when we encountered the ecstasy, we got a taste of Dunn's philosophy of lover's souls, which become a united whole that transcends without replacing their bodies. In that poem, the setting was two lovers seated together, by a riverbed, in perfect harmony.

In a valediction-forbidding morning, though, Dunn asks the question, what happens when the lovers are separated from one another? As it turns out, the separation does nothing to lessen the love, but actually expands the love, like gold to airy thinness beat. Gold is known not only for its preciousness,

but its malleability. You can take a quantity of gold and hammer it down to a very thin, yet dourer, width, which then allows it to expand over a greater space. Dunn proposes that real love, refined love, love that feeds on the mind above the body of the lover, has the same quality as gold. Rather than enduring a brittle split, or a breach, as our poet calls it, when the lovers must be separated, the refined love undergoes an expansion like that of gold, proportionate to the distance

between the pair. With all that said, let's dive in. A Valediction Forbiting Morning by John Dunn. 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 a 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-assured of the mind, care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Are 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 centre 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 the other foot, obliquely run. Thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end, where I begun. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. If you enjoyed this episode, consider following the Poetry Fix on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

And if you have any poems you want to see in a few, future episode, email your suggestions to the poetry fix at gmail.com. Join me next week and we'll be reading Edmund Spencer's Epithalamian.