To tie us to that way?
O give no way to grief, etc.”
In his “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” Donne again recurs to the subject of separation and explains by the figure of the compass how their souls will be one. The love in which the mind is bent on the objects of sense cannot admit of absence; but the love shared by Donne and his mistress is so refined that their souls suffer only an expansion and not separation in absence.
“Dull sublunary lover’s love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.
“But we by a love so far refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,