“A valediction forbidding mourning” is a song and it is written by John Donne. The reader can put attention on the phonological level and on the use of a lot of hyperboles. This song speaks about death and love. Love is founded both on the body and on the soul. Distance isn’t lost of love. The dolor provocated by the distance or lack of someone can’t be exaggerated.

Reading the title an intelligent reader can undestand that the song speaks about someone who had lost a person. When someone die, other people in particulary family have a deep dolor that it is very difficult not to express it.  

Considering the structure, the song is arranged into quatrains ( stanzas of four lines) and each one have a particulary sound, characteristic of a song. In the first quatrain the speaking voice describes someone’s death. At the moment that men die and whisper to their souls to go, some of their sad friends say that their breath goes. This lines rappresents the moment of the death: the breath and the souls go in the sky and friends are sad for their death. In addition the speaking voice says that when men die, they have a soul separated from body.

In the second quatrain, the speaking voice supports to not to cry to much when there is a pain. He claims that sad friends must melt from dolor without having a “tear-floods” or “sigh-tempests” because it would be to profane the joy. When a person die, from the author’s point of view, there isn’t need for so many tears and sighs because it would be like offending people.

In the third quatrain, the speaking voice compared the pain experienced with the death of someone with the pain experienced by the movement of the earth. The narrator says that human beings don’t realize what means and what earthquakes entail and they don’t says what the trepidation of the spheres causes. With this affermation, he wants to speak about love and wants to say that when you love someone, the trepitadion of love is stronger than the earthquakes.

In the fouth quatrain, the speaking voice speaks about the love of sublunary lovers. Sublunary lovers have a soul that is only sense. They don’t admit that the ebsence because it eliminates the thing which elemented it. The sublunary lovers consider the sense more important than the soul. Love is sense but if the lover is not there, one cannot love.  In the fifth and sixth quatrain, the speaking voice says that the true lovers have a refined love that it is reassured by someone’s mind and the lovers don’t worry about losing eyes, lips and hands. The two souls become one and even if there is distancing love doesn’t collapse. This is underlines with a similitude. The displacement between two people is compared to an expansion as when gold is beaten to make it up. The displacement is some of positive that it does not lead to the breaking of love. In the last lines, the writer brigs a metaphor: the two people who possess a refined love are compared to a compass. The two feet of compass represent the two lowers, which move with respect to each other.
The foot of the compass that is standing still represents the woman and the other foot represents man. The second foot of the compass that moves symbolize man’s journey. If the woman’s foot is still, man travels but at the same time he bows and adapts to the woman. the circle drawn by the compass represents perfect love and heaven on earth. In addition, for this perfect love, when man has finished journey, he returns in the place of departure or by the woman.    

 At the beginning the sound is very sad because it represents the pain of losing someone.  Then the sound become more strong because it symbolizes the love that it must be ensured by body and mind. The writer uses a lot of hyperboles and metaphors to explain deeply the importance of a refined love and to ridicule the dolor caused by lack.

Concluding, the narrator speaks about death and love with a different code from other poets. He is an innovator because he uses a different language to make fun of other poets which they use courtly love code.  The writer uses the semantic field of scienze to make man aware that the pain caused by the earth is stronger than that caused by a lack. For this, the dolor caused by an absence must not be too exaggerated.   In addition, he uses a rhetorical language and a lot of exaggerations to resize the dolor of death and love.