A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
A friend writes:
To help in bracing yourself for T’s departure, I recommend revisiting (I’m sure you know it) Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, the greatest love poem in English about how to cope with separation. I humbly suggest, if you can bear to forgo reading the poem aloud yourself, to have T read it to you.
Interestingly, I have been reciting these lyrics to her on and off for the past few weeks – taking “tho I must part, endure not yet a breach but an expansion, like gold to airy thinness beat” – or, “if they are two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two, they soul, the fixed foot, makes no show to move, but doth if they other do.”