Love is Abstract; Now and Forever

Love is abstract. It always has been and it always will be. Centuries upon centuries people, poets, authors, composers, etc, have tried to express what love is. But that is all they have ever done, expressed what they believe love to be. They have never proven anything. Each individual still has his or her own idea about what love is. This timeless struggle to truly define love, and therefore a successful relationship, is displayed quite differently through the use of similes, strong imagery, and irony in John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, and Judith Minty's Conjoined.

From the beginning both speakers acknowledge that there is a physical, and nothing beyond that, type of love. The speaker in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, says "Dull sublunary lovers' love/(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit/Absence, because it doth remove/Those things which elemented it" (Stanza 4). Just as in Conjoined when the speaker says "Do you feel the skin that binds us/together as we move, heavy in this house" (Stanza 3). Imagery is used by both of the speakers to portray a love that is physical and simple. It does not mention the lovers' souls or even their love really but just the bond that they have when together. This bond comes across as more of a law that they are now required to follow instead of a bond that comes naturally.

In contrast to the physical type of love, the speaker in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning uses imagery to show that the love spoken of in the poem goes beyond the simple, earthly love. "So let us melt, and make no noise,/No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,/"Twere profanation of our joys/To tell the laity of our love" (Stanza 2). Tears and sighs are both strong emotions used when people are parting just as floods and tempests are strong "emotions" demonstrated by the earth. Yet, the speaker says that the lovers are not going to take part in the crying and sighing. Which in turn would mean that there would not be any floods or tempests. The lovers bypassing the normal earthly responses to change shows that their love is deeper and more true than a superficial or physical (earthly) love. They have something more, something spiritual. This is quite different than the "lovers" in Conjoined who are more or less stuck together and not experiencing that deep, spiritual love.

Both speakers use similes in order to portray the lovers' bonds, yet they both have extremely different meanings. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning it is obvious to the reader that the lovers do not want to part but they keep close to them the knowledge that they have a bond that cannot be broken. "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" (Stanza 6). The simile is very effective because it also serves as imagery. The reader can actually picture the gold being stretched to an almost invisible size while still staying the same pure gold it was in the beginning. Thus, no matter how far apart they are the lovers will still share their strong bond and never be disconnected. In Conjoined on the other hand the speaker uses a simile that is not as pleasant. "An accident, like the two-headed calf rooted/in one body, fighting to suck at its mother's teats;/or like those other freaks, Chang and Eng, twins/joined at the chest by skin and muscle, doomed/to live, even make love, together for sixty years" (Stanza 2). This powerful imagery makes the reader uncomfortable and creates a feeling of contempt. The couple in Conjoined is exactly that; conjoined, stuck together no matter what. Stuck implies a very different feeling than just togetherness. These two people are being forced to stay together and by the imagery used the speaker feels as though it is unnatural.

It is extremely apparent to the reader that the couples in these two poems are very different and only one of them actually wants to stay together. The ironic part is that the lovers that want to stay together cannot an the couple that does not want to be together is stuck together forever.
The speaker in Conjoined uses imagery once again when saying, "We cannot escape each other" (Stanza 3). Where on a completely different note A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning says "Such wilt thou be to me, who must/Like th' other foot, obliquely run;/Thy firmness draws my circle just,/And makes me end where I begun" (Stanza 9). The speaker in the first poem uses the word "escape". Escape means that one is trying to get away or rid itself of something. Portraying the fact that the couple does not want to be together but they have no way of changing that. The speaker in the second poem says that although the lovers have to be apart they will come back to each other in the end because that is how it is meant to be.


Ultimately, both of the poems show that people still have very differing view points when it comes to love. But maybe that is the point. That different people are going to feel in many different ways when it comes to love and nothing can ever be pinned down. Perhaps the irony is displaying that the two polar opposites are simply just two, out or many different, and abstract ways of looking at love.