For me, the loss of Jill is a sadness I feel on a many levels. First and foremost, a person whom I genuinely cared about has passed away. She passed away far too soon and has left behind so many people who would give anything to have just another minute with her. My heart aches deeply for Jill's family and friends. Every time I think of Jill, I think of how many people truly LOVED her. And how well she loved them all back. I feel absolutely bereft for my sister, who lost her hands-down best friend ever in the world. Shannon wrote this last year and I can barely get through it without bursting into tears. It is absoluetly gut-wrenching to me.
And that brings me to the meat & potatoes of my post. When at a loss for something beautiful and eloquent to say, in true English teacher fashion, I reach into the poetry vault. Today I choose John Donne's poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." Bear with me as I get teachery for a minute, but I have to explain WHY I choose this poem.
In this poem, Donne uses the image of the compass-- think geometry, not navigational-- to explain the way that love continues even after death. The idea that those who remain on earth are like the fixed foot, and the person who has passed is like the unfixed foot; while that foot travels far away, it is still always connected to the fixed foot. I like that Donne presents us with the idea that even death cannot conquer deep and abiding love-- instead it expands it and turns it into something different.
So without further ado:
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 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 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 the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
