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The short story, 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,' by John Donne explores love through the ideas of assurance and separation. This story focuses on the strength of spiritual love in a long distance relationship. Although physical love brings lovers closer together on a tangible level, spiritual love questions the strength of the lovers' emotional commitments.
Donne uses imagery to convey that the separation between the two lovers in the poem, will only be an expansion in love, never a breach. Instead of distance working to separate and break the two apart, it will allow their love to expand and, therefore, grow. Donne uses vivid imagery to impart his moral themes on his audience. A truer, more refined love, Donne explains, comes from a connection at the mind, the joining of two souls as one, not physicality. Physical presence is irrelevant if a true marriage of the minds has occurred, joining a pair of lovers' souls eternally. The speaker explains that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover.
In order to describe the form which Donne gives to true love he chooses to use imagery to create a scene of separation. In the very first lines of the poem, before he leaves, the speaker tells his lover that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and sorrow. Instead, he insists that when two people are in love, absence is not a rightful cause for despair. While they are apart they should not be upset about it nor mourn over the fact that they cannot be physically together. In turn, such outward sorrow would profane their love and make it seem in-genuine or fake. Expressing such despair publicly will only prove to show others that the strength of their love is not as binded as it seems. In truth, this expresses that the speaker himself believes so profoundly in the strength of the spiritual love they share that even shedding tear would only serve justice to a solely physical love between the pair. He says to her, 'So let us melt and make no noise,' because although they may be upset that they must part is important not to express outward sorrow, he is sure that they will meet again. He also wishes not to 'profane' their love and publicly display the sorrow they share from parting physically.
Donne uses the term melt to allow the reader to visualize something liquid, in heat and under pressure ice melts. With this vision, we see that in comparison to ice melting, humans also 'melt' emotionally with their tears.
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