“I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.”~John Donne

Donne wrote this poem to his wife, Anne in 1611 as he was leaving the country on a diplomatic mission to France. The two had been married by this time for about ten years. Anne was related, by marriage, to Donne’s employer, and in 1601 when Anne was seventeen years old, she and John married, even though he knew the marriage would not be acceptable to his employer or to Anne’s father. Indeed, after the two married, Donne was fired from his job and spent a brief time in jail. John Donne and his beloved wife Anne had twelve children, five of whom died young, and then Anne herself died in 1617, leaving John with the surviving children to raise and support. John Donne never remarried.

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.

Read more about the poem and its background here.