Lesson Plans

Assignment to have been completed: They should also have read “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” pp. 720-721 of Perrine’s Literature and written out responses to the questions that follow on p. 721.

Objectives:

Activities:

• A. Collect the exercise on p. 724.
  • 1. Personification and metaphor: day = a man; sky = a blue urn; sunlight = fire.
  • 2. Simile: words = sunbeam
  • 3. Personification: Joy, Temperance, Repose = persons
  • 4. Metonymy: pen = literature or persuasive writing; sword = armed might or armies
  • 5. Metaphor: oaths = straw; human desire or impulse = fire in the blood
  • 6. Metaphor: conventional minds or souls = furnished rooms. (Nothing in a furnished room belongs to or is original with its occupant.)
  • 7. LITERAL
  • 8. Metaphor: the desert = a lion
  • 9. Metonymy: tomorrow = the day of death; the underlying metaphor is that a lifetime = one day; eating and drinking = living the good life
  • 10. LITERAL
• A. Respond to “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne.

  • 1. Vocabulary:

    • a. valediction (title): a speech or statement made as a farewell
    • b. profanation (7): desecration; improper, unworthy, or degrading use; abuse
    • c. laity (8): all those persons who are not members of a given profession or other specialized field
    • d. trepidation (11): involuntary trembling or quivering
    • e. innocent (12): not dangerous or harmful; innocuous
    • f. sublunary (13): of this world; earthly
    • g. elemented (16): created; composed the most basic essence of

  • 2. Is the speaker in the poem about to die? Or about to leave on a journey? (The answer may be found in a careful analysis of the simile in the last three stanzas.)

    The speaker is not dying. In the concluding simile, it is the traveling foot of the compass that “comes home” to the fixed foot, not the fixed foot that follows after the traveling foot to join it in some other place (such as heaven).

    If students are tempted to conclude that the speaker is dying because they have interpreted the death image in the first stanza in that manner. Remind them that the “virtuous men” in the first stanza belong to the figurative part of a simile, not to the literal referent. The sense is “Let us part from each other as silently and imperceptibly as a dying virtuous man parts from his soul.”

    Izaak Walton, Donne’s first biographer, tells us that Donne wrote this poem to his wife and gave it to her before leaving on an embassy to the French court, a project that would separate them for two months. His wife, who was with child at the, had been reluctant to let him go, as she feared some ill during his absence.

  • 3. The poem is organized around a contrast of two kinds of lovers: the “laity” (8) and, as their implied opposite, the “priesthood.” Are these terms literal or metaphorical? What is the essential difference between their two kinds of love? How, according to the speaker, does their behavior differ when they must separate from each other? What is the motivation of the speaker in this “valediction”?

    The terms are, of course, metaphorical.

    The love of the true lovers (members of the “priesthood”) is a love of souls and minds rather than primarily of senses (that of the “laity”); therefore, they can never be truly parted, and they do not “carry on” (like “lay lovers”) when they are physically separated.

    The speaker wishes to reassure his beloved that their parting should be filled with confidence, refinement, and a sense of necessary reunion. (Donne wished to reassure his pregnant wife that he would return to her.)

  • 4. Find and explain three similes and one metaphor used to describe the parting of true lovers. The figure in the last three stanzas is one of the most famous in English literature. Demonstrate its appropriateness by obtaining a drawing compass or by using two pencils to imitate the two legs.

    In lines first stanza the speaker compares the parting of true lovers o the parting of virtuous men from life. In the sixth stanza, he compares the parting of true lovers to the expansion of gold beaten into gold leaf. Then in stanzas 7 - 9, he compares the parting to the separation of the legs of a pair of drawing compasses. A metaphor compares the parting to the almost imperceptible “trepidation” (trembling) of the spheres (as contrasted to the gross movements of the earth - flood, tempest, and earthquake.).

  • 5. What kind of language is used in the poem? Is the language consonant with the figures of speech?

    Donne uses the language of the sciences and mathematics just as he uses figures drawn from geology, astronomy, and geometry.

Assignment for next class meeting: Read Billy Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry,” pp. 723 in Perrine’s Literature and written out responses to the questions that follow on p. 724.