The Full Text of “A Valediction: Of Weeping”
1 Let me pour forth
2My tears before thy face whilst I stay here,
3For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
4And by this mintage they are something worth,
5 For thus they be
6 Pregnant of thee;
7Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
8When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
9So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.
10 On a round ball
11A workman that hath copies by can lay
12An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
13And quickly make that, which was nothing, all;
14 So doth each tear
15 Which thee doth wear,
16A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
17Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
18This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so.
19 O more than moon,
20Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere;
21Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
22To teach the sea what it may do too soon.
23 Let not the wind
24 Example find,
25To do me more harm than it purposeth;
26Since thou and I sigh one another's breath,
27Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's death.
The Full Text of “A Valediction: Of Weeping”
1 Let me pour forth
2My tears before thy face whilst I stay here,
3For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
4And by this mintage they are something worth,
5 For thus they be
6 Pregnant of thee;
7Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
8When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
9So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.
10 On a round ball
11A workman that hath copies by can lay
12An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
13And quickly make that, which was nothing, all;
14 So doth each tear
15 Which thee doth wear,
16A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
17Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
18This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so.
19 O more than moon,
20Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere;
21Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
22To teach the sea what it may do too soon.
23 Let not the wind
24 Example find,
25To do me more harm than it purposeth;
26Since thou and I sigh one another's breath,
27Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's death.
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“A Valediction: Of Weeping” Introduction
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"A Valediction: Of Weeping" is English Metaphysical poet John Donne's tale of a sad goodbye. As the speaker and his beloved share a last embrace before the speaker leaves on a long voyage, the speaker reflects on what his beloved means to him—literally. Every teardrop that holds his beloved's reflection, the speaker says, is a whole world, marked with the beloved's face as a globe is marked with the continents. Love, the poem suggests, can make two people into each other's worlds, and thus turn a farewell into the end of the world. Like nearly all of Donne's poetry, "A Valediction: Of Weeping" wasn't published until after Donne's death; it first appeared in the posthumous collection Poems (1633).
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“A Valediction: Of Weeping” Summary
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Let me weep while I'm here in your arms. As long as I'm here, your face reflects in my teardrops, so they're stamped with your image like coins stamped with the faces of kings and queens—and that makes them valuable. You see, with your reflection in them, my tears become pregnant with images of you. These tears are the fruit of terrible mourning, and the symbols of much more pain to come. Whenever one of my tears drops, the little image of you in it falls and vanishes, too. In just that way, when you and I are far away in different countries, we might as well be nothing.
On a plain sphere, a craftsman who has a map to work from can inscribe a Europe, an Africa, and an Asia, and thus make what was just a blank into the whole world. In the same way, every tear of mine that reflects your face becomes a globe—no, a whole world. Soon, though, your tears, mixing with mine, flood that little world: your tears wash away your own heavenly reflection in my tears.
O my beloved, more than the moon to me, don't use your tidal pull to flood me in oceans of tears. Don't cry for me as if I'm already dead while I stand here in your arms; don't teach the ocean to drown me, as it very well may all too soon. Don't give the wind a good example of how it can blow more dangerously than it intends to now. Since you and I share our life's breath, whoever sighs more deeply is the most unkind: wasting breath means hurrying along the other's death.
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“A Valediction: Of Weeping” Themes
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The Pains of Parting
The speaker of “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” about to depart on a long sea voyage, bids his beloved farewell with a final, tearful embrace. His words reflect his anxiety over whether the pair will ever meet again: he cautions his beloved not to drown him in tears, in case she gives the ocean any ideas! The last moments before a parting, this poem suggests, are particularly painful, reminding lovers both of how close they are and how uncertain the future is.
As the speaker and his beloved weep in each other’s arms, the speaker relishes the fact that each of his tears reflects his beloved’s face. Because they have her image in them, his teardrops become as valuable to him as if they were coins “stamp[ed]” with her portrait, or even wombs “pregnant” with her child (as if she were the father and the speaker the mother). In fact, these reflective tears, holding the beloved’s image, become a whole “world” to the speaker, just as a plain sphere decorated with the images of the continents becomes a “globe.”
Alas, the speaker goes on, all this is only true for as long as the pair are together. As soon as the couple are separated and those tears can’t reflect the beloved’s face anymore, then “thou and I are nothing.” Since the couple are each other’s whole world, their separation will feel like the end of the world.
The terrible pain of this parting is only strengthened by the fact that the speaker will be in genuine danger on his long sea journey. As the speaker cautions his beloved not to cry too hard in case her tears and sighs “teach the sea” to kick up a storm and drown him, the poem suggests that what’s so sad and hard about leaving the people you love isn’t just that you feel like “nothing” without them: it’s not knowing for certain whether you’ll ever see them again.
The couple’s tears thus reflect (literally!) the idea that love and pain go hand in hand. To love someone is to suffer terribly when they can’t be near you.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Love and Connection
As the poem’s speaker embraces his beloved before leaving on a journey, he feels that he and she are so close that they might as well share the same “breath.” Their love is so deep that their separation, however painful, can never quite be complete. A great love, this poem suggests, can make two people into one, connecting them body and soul.
Weeping as they part, the poem’s speaker tells his beloved that every one of his tears, in reflecting her face, has become “pregnant” with her image. There’s a role reversal in this metaphor: the speaker’s female beloved is the father, and the male speaker the mother of these little reflection-babies. The two lovers, this image suggests, are so close that they can practically inhabit each other’s bodies.
In fact, the speaker goes so far as to say that he and his beloved “sigh one another’s breath”—an image that hints they share not just a body, but a spirit. (Breath is a traditional symbol not just for physical life, but for the soul.) Sharing one life, they also share responsibility for each other; as the speaker tries to console his beloved and dry her tears, he reminds her that whoever “sighs most” uses up their shared allotment of breath and thus “hastes the other’s death”!
Such an intense connection, the poem suggests, is both consoling and painful. While the couple will remain interwoven no matter how far apart they travel, their parting also feels like being ripped in two.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Valediction: Of Weeping”
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Lines 1-4
Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,A "valediction" is a farewell, and this poem's farewell is a tearful one. As the poem begins, the speaker and his beloved share a final embrace before he departs on a long sea voyage.
Take a look at the enjambment in the first lines:
Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face whilst I stay here,The broken line here suggests a catch in the speaker's voice, and it also opens up the idea that the speaker will "pour forth" more than tears. This passionate poem will reflect "on weeping," considering what lovers' tears might mean and reveal.
So long as they "stay here" in each other's arms, the speaker tells his beloved, his tears are precious. Every one of his teardrops reflects his beloved's face; it's "stamp[ed]" with her image the way a coin is stamped with the face of a monarch. "And by this mintage" (in other words, through this coin-making process), what would otherwise have been plain old tears become valuable.
This conceit—the first of many elaborate extended metaphors the speaker will explore—makes the claim that the speaker's tears are worth something because they're born of his deep feelings for his beloved. It also suggests that his beloved is a queen in his eyes, her mere image capable of making unremarkable matter into wealth.
Even beyond these ideas, this image paints a picture of infinity. If the speaker's beloved is standing where her face can reflect in all of his teardrops (already a dizzying vision: imagine all those tiny faces!), then perhaps his face is reflecting in all of her teardrops, too—and those faces are crying and reflecting, and those faces are crying and reflecting. Just as lovers' eyes endlessly mirror each other in "The Canonization," another of Donne's great love poems, the reflective, coin-like tears here create an endless shower of gold.
This tearful embrace, in other words, shows that these lovers are everything to each other: their "worth" in each other's eyes (literally!) is endless. No wonder they're crying, then. When they're apart, they feel as if they've lost everything.
The poem's shape reflects both their love and their grief. Mostly written in iambs (metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "my tears"), the poem's lines dance between:
- Dimeter—lines with two feet, as in "For thus | they be"
- Pentameter—lines with five feet, as in "And by | this mint- | age they | are some- | thing worth"
- And closing lines of hexameter—lines with six feet, as in "So thou | and I | are no- | thing then, | when on | a di- | verse shore." (Note that the word "diverse," in Donne's 17th-century English, means "different" and is pronounced DYE-verse rather than di-VERSE.)
The short, choked-up lines of dimeter suggest the difficulty of speaking through tears; the longer lines, outpourings of thought and feeling.
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Lines 5-9
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore. -
Lines 10-16
On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all;
So doth each tear
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, -
Lines 17-18
Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so. -
Lines 19-22
O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere;
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon. -
Lines 23-27
Let not the wind
Example find,
To do me more harm than it purposeth;
Since thou and I sigh one another's breath,
Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's death.
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“A Valediction: Of Weeping” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
Like most of John Donne's poems, "A Valediction: Of Weeping" rests on rich conceits, or elaborate extended metaphors. Here, all of those conceits revolve around teardrops, transformed by the power of metaphor into everything from coins to wombs to worlds.
Since there are so very many conceits in this poem, we'll take a look at them stanza by stanza here.
Stanza 1:
- While the speaker and his beloved are still together and still embracing, the speaker observes, every one of his tears is dear to him: they're all "stamp[ed]" with the tiny reflection of his beloved's face, and "by this mintage" (that is, through this coin-making process), they become valuable. This conceit suggests that the beloved's image has a transformative power. Just as the stamp of a monarch's face turns plain metal into legal tender, the beloved's face turns a plain teardrop into something precious.
- The speaker doesn't stop there. In the very next lines, he remarks that each of these stamped tears is also "pregnant of thee": that is, the beloved's reflected image turns each teardrop into a tiny pregnant womb hosting a reflection-baby. This striking image suggests that the speaker and his beloved are so close that they practically inhabit each other's bodies. The male speaker becomes the mother, impregnated by the sight of his beloved!
Stanza 2:
- The speaker has already declared that the reflection of his beloved makes his tears fertile and valuable. His next conceit goes a step further. In the first lines of the second stanza, he introduces the idea that a blank sphere, an image of "nothing," becomes an image of "all" when it's decorated with the continents: in other words, it becomes a globe, a picture of the whole world. Just the same thing happens when his beloved is reflected in his tears, the speaker insists. Her image makes every tear that falls from his eyes into a world—an elegant way of saying that she's everything to him.
Stanza 3:
- For all that the speaker feels his own tears are made precious by his beloved's presence, he's also eager to dry her tears, to console her. In the final stanza, then, he imagines her as a "moon," capable of drawing up the tides. Since he's about to leave on a sea voyage, he tells her, she must not cry so hard, in case her tide of tears rises up and drowns him, or her heartbroken sighs encourage the wind to blow up a storm.
- This closing image suggests that the speaker feels the bittersweet pain and the responsibility of love. The couple's love beautifies their grief at parting—and makes the speaker wish his beloved didn't have to hurt so badly.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Metaphor
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Enjambment
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Allusion
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Assonance
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"A Valediction: Of Weeping" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Pour forth
- Thy, Thine, Thee, Thou
- Coins
- Stamp
- Mintage
- Emblems
- "When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore"
- Diverse
- Hath
- Afric
- Doth
- Yea
- "Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere"
- "Weep me not dead"
- Forbear
- Purposeth
- Whoe'er
- Hastes
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Pour out.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Valediction: Of Weeping”
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Form
"A Valediction: Of Weeping" uses a form of Donne's own invention. The poem is divided into three stanzas of nine lines apiece. While the meter is mostly iambic (that is, it's written in feet that go da-DUM, as in "O more | than moon"), line length varies a lot, creating a surprising and dramatic rhythm.
All these stylistic choices suit the speaker's purpose. As a valediction (one of a few that Donne wrote), this is a poem of farewell, the speaker's attempt to console his beloved as he takes off for a long sea journey. He does so with Donne's characteristic blend of intellectual brilliance and intense emotion:
- The long, evolving stanzas make plenty of room for the speaker to explore elaborate conceits: every tear he sheds, he tells his beloved, is full of her, whether it becomes a coin stamped with her reflected face or a womb swollen with her child.
- In the midst of all this heady philosophy, short lines intrude like a catch in the speaker's voice. The speaker himself says that he's crying; those broken lines suggest he's out-and-out sobbing.
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Meter
"A Valediction: Of Weeping" is written primarily in iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm (as in "My tears"). But it doesn't stick to one type of iambic meter throughout. Instead, each stanza uses an evolving rhythm: the speaker interweaves longer, more reflective lines with short, punchy ones.
For example, the first line of each stanza is written in dimeter (only two feet), as in line 19 here:
O more | than moon,
Then, the second through fourth lines are written in pentameter (five feet), as in line 4:
And by | this mint- | age they | are some- | thing worth,
The couplet in the middle of the stanzas returns to dimeter, the seventh and eight lines return to pentameter, and the last lines are in hexameter (six feet), as in line 9:
So thou | and I | are no- | thing then, | when on | a di- | verse shore.
(Note that "diverse," in Donne's 17th-century English, isn't pronounced dy-VERSE, but DY-verse.)
The alternation of short sharp lines and drawn-out, thoughtful ones reflects the speaker's state of mind as he veers between stabs of pain and meditations on the nature of love and grief. Each of those long concluding hexameter lines describes the couple's shared sorrow.
The poem doesn't stick to iambic feet all the way through, but throws in some variations that help the speaker's voice to sound natural. For instance, the first line of the second stanza pushes all its stresses into its second foot, creating a spondee (a foot with a DUM-DUM rhythm):
On a | round ball
Those two strong stresses invite readers to draw the sounds of the words out. The long vowel of "round"—itself a big round sound—evokes the globe these words describe.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "A Valediction: Of Weeping" runs like this:
ABBA CC DDD
This complex pattern divides each stanza into three movements. In the ABBA sections, the speaker introduces conceits:
- the idea of tears as coins in the first stanza,
- the vision of a plain ball turned into a globe in the second,
- and the image of the beloved as a moon in the third.
The CC sections build on those introductory ideas (for instance, when the speaker says that a tear that reflects his beloved's face is like a globe in the second stanza). Finally, the DDD sections describe the speaker's and his beloved's predicament in the light of these complex metaphors.
Besides tracing the development of the speaker's ideas, these rhymes reflect tides of feeling. Starting from that leisurely, reflective ABBA pattern, the speaker builds to an intense CC couplet and an even more heated DDD triplet, a movement that evokes waves of love and pain.
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“A Valediction: Of Weeping” Speaker
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The poem's passionate speaker has a lot in common with Donne himself. Donne, like this speaker, took to sea and was parted from his wife for long, painful stretches of time. The speaker's vivid wit, too, is Donne's own. His capacity to see coins, children, and worlds entire reflected in a single tear mark him out as a visionary, a man of imagination.
This is only one of Donne's many love poems, and like the others is riddled with Donne's favorite elaborate conceits (and filthy puns). It also forms a companion piece to another tender valediction (or farewell poem).
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“A Valediction: Of Weeping” Setting
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The speaker's imminent dangerous sea voyage suggests that this poem is set in Donne's own time and place: 17th-century England. Donne lived in the last stages of what we now call the Age of Exploration, a period of the Renaissance during which European expeditions sailed across the globe. A journey by ship in that era might be both a lucrative and a terrifying proposition: wrecks were common, and plenty of sailors didn't ever come home. The speaker's tearful farewell to his beloved shows that he's all too well aware that this embrace may be their last.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Valediction: Of Weeping”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English writers who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral poetry about love and God; George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.
Donne was the prototypical metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences and a great writer of love poems (like this one) that mingle images of holiness with filthy puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Like the vast majority of his poetry, "A Valediction: Of Weeping" didn't appear in print until several years after his death in 1633, when his collection Poems was posthumously published.
Donne's mixture of cynicism, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday; Johnson, for instance, a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, did not mean "metaphysical poet" as a compliment, seeing Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T.S. Eliot to Yeats to A.S. Byatt.
Historical Context
John Donne lived and wrote during a time of intense change. He was born at the end of an era, growing up during the last years of Elizabeth I's reign.
After a rocky start, Elizabeth stabilized an England still thrown into turmoil by religious schism. Her father Henry VIII's decision to split from the Pope and found his own national Church of England led to generations of conflict and bloodshed between English Protestants and Catholic loyalists. Elizabeth's political skill, her dramatic military victories against the Spanish, and her canny decision to present herself as an almost supernatural, Artemis-like "Virgin Queen" all helped to create a new sense of English national identity in the midst of chaos.
The ambitious Donne first gained a political foothold as a courtier in Elizabeth's service, but he was ignominiously thrown into prison when he eloped with Anne More, the daughter of an important official. By the time he was released, reconciled with his father-in-law, and returned to polite society, he had to work his way into the favor of a whole new monarch: James I, who took the throne in 1603.
The new king's court was worldly, intellectual, and superstitious all at once: James was a great patron of the arts and sciences, but also pious in a rather paranoid way, anxious about demons and witches.
Luckily for Donne, James was a good enough judge of talent to be impressed with his poetry. But James was also a good enough judge of talent to spot that Donne would make an outstanding clergyman, and he refused to accept the poet as a run-of-the-mill courtier. The reluctant Donne eventually had to accept the king's will, and he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621. Just as James had predicted, Donne became a passionate and influential Anglican priest. Today Donne lies buried in the very cathedral where he once preached.
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More “A Valediction: Of Weeping” Resources
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External Resources
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The Metaphysical Poets — Learn more about the witty, brilliant 17th-century literary movement for which Donne is the poster boy.
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Donne's Portrait — Admire a rather dashing portrait of Donne as a young lover.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Donne's life and work via the British Library.
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Poems (1633) — Take a look at images from Donne's posthumous collection Poems (in which this poem was first printed).
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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