A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

• 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 aery 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 th’ 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 th’ other foot, obliquely run;
• Thy firmness makes my circle just,
• And makes me end where I begun.