Donne’s Circles
John Donne often used images of circles and circularity, for both erotic and devotional poems. In “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” the compasses represent the movement of lovers, while in the two sermons excerpted below circles represent the cycle of life.
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,
- “Now his breath goes,” 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
- Of absence, ’cause it doth remove
- The thing which elemented it.
- But we by a love so much refined,
- That ourselves know not what it is,
- Inter-assurèd 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 fix’d 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.
Preached to the Lords upon Easter-day, at the Communion, The King Being Then Dangerously Sick at New-Market
Take a flat Map, a Globe in plano, and here is East, and there is West, as far asunder as two points can be put: but reduce this flat Map to roundnesse, which is the true form, and then East and West touch one another, and are all one: So consider mans life aright, to be a Circle, Pulvis es, & in pulverem reverteris, Dust thou art, and to dust thou must return; Nudus egressus, Nudus revertar, Naked I came, and naked I must go; In this, the circle, the two points meet, the womb and the grave are but one point, they make but one station, there is but a step from that to this. This brought in that custome amongst the Greek Emperours, that ever at the day of their Coronation, they were presented with severall sorts of Marble, that they might then bespeak their Tombe. And this brought in that Custome into the Primitive Church, that they called the Martyrs dayes, wherein they suffered, Natalitia Martyrum, their birth dayes; birth, and death is all one.
Their death was a birth to them into another life, into the glory of God; It ended one Circle, and created another; for immortality, and eternity is a Circle too; not a Circle where two points meet, but a Circle made at once; This life is a Circle, made with a Compasse, that passes from point to point; That life is a Circle stamped with a print, an endlesse, and perfect Circle, as soone as it begins. Of this Circle, the Mathematician is our great and good God; The other Circle we make up our selves; we bring the Cradle, and Grave together by a course of nature …
So these Epistles are Catholick, so they are Canonical, and they are Circular so. But yet, though in a Circle we know not where the compass began, we know not which was the first point; yet we know, that the last point of the Circle returns to the first, and so becomes all one; and as much as we know the last, we know the first point. Since then the last point of that Circle, in which God hath created us to move, is a kingdome (for it is a kingdom of heaven) and it is a Court (for it is that glorious Court, which is the presence of God, in the communion of his Saints) it is a fair and a pious conception, for this Congregation, here present now in this place, to believe, that the first point of this Circle of our Apostle here, is a Court too …