So this essay is way overdue! To be honest I finished it a couple months ago, right at the end of my study abroad but had simply not taken the time to put it up. So here it is! The assignment was to personalize a poem that touched us in some way or another. With this in mind, I chose John Donne, the metaphysical poet who can talk on everything from sexual tension via fleas to true love regardless of distance in the poem I chose "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." Since there are no picture captions this time around, these pictures are from Spencer's and my honeymoon in Mendocino, California. And finally, with renewed vigor and determination I have two or three essays in the making right now so I should be posting more consistently . . . at least that's my New Year's Resolution in the middle of the year. :) Enjoy!
An Attempt by Living Happily
I was sitting in a room, my own room, that felt nothing like my own on the campus of East Anglia University in Norwich, England. And I was crying, a lot. I felt dumb for being so emotional over such a silly issue but even so, I was grateful that I had my own room so I could “let it out” this one time. I doubt anyone would have thought the less of me for missing my loved ones, more especially my fiance, but for some reason, I felt almost guilty...selfish even for lacking the gusto to cope with our relatively short separation. For heaven's sake, I was sitting in England and still, I was mourning. I felt ridiculous. But looking back now, perhaps it more disturbing than feeling ridiculous in my sorrow, was that in my sorrow I felt guilt.
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An Attempt by Living Happily
“Do you miss him?”
In some variation or another, this is the question most frequently asked of me here on my study abroad. And my answer is always the same: “yes.” And true to form the same thought will surely follow: “Oh you can tell...great.”
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I’ve often felt myself consciously attempting to hide my visible “neediness” in hopes that it would just go away and I would prove stronger than I felt. I remember saying goodbye and hardly shedding a tear. I couldn’t because I knew if I started that my heart was liable to break. This denial of emotion, of which I will later explain the origins, continued for weeks until I was sitting alone; the moment in which my pretense utterly shattered.
My acquaintance with mourning is not exactly traditional, but in reality very common. The only person I’ve ever been close to who has passed away was my adopted Grandma down the street. In the moment, I was told that she had finally succumbed to the cancer mourning felt appropriate, necessary even. But I have rarely felt the comfort of “excused mourning” again.
I suppose comfort and sadness are not words commonly used together, so perhaps I should simply learn not to hope for both. But in lieu of cathartic comfort, often found in expressed sorrow, one does not necessarily expect the pangs of guilt either. I suppose my reoccurring guilt began when I was quite young. Our family was just starting, my parent’s marriage was strained from financial pressures too weighty for any. There were times, as I grew up, that I dreamed I could fix all of our “problems”...but I hardly knew where to start. But one day I became disillusioned. I don’t remember why, the day, or the instant, but it was in that moment that I stopped crying. Looking back now I can decipher a strange fissure between the time when I could cry and the time I could not. I imagine that somewhere between those states I realized that if I could not fix our
problems then at least I wouldn’t add to them. I wouldn’t cry or mourn, I wouldn’t be “weak,” and I would never be a problem. Instead, I would stand strong as a haven of calm and support for those who struggled, who might never understand how I truly empathized.
problems then at least I wouldn’t add to them. I wouldn’t cry or mourn, I wouldn’t be “weak,” and I would never be a problem. Instead, I would stand strong as a haven of calm and support for those who struggled, who might never understand how I truly empathized.
I am still this way though I have since attempted emotional balance. But even now I find no comfort or catharsis from tears and expressed sorrow but rather guilt for having let myself slip and appear weak.
I suppose this isn’t entirely healthy.
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Well as I sat in Norwich, attempting to be “healthy” and to feel comfortable crying a couple poems came to mind. The first was “Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning. The first lines of the poem are permanently etched into my mind since it is with them that Spencer proposed to me. They say, “Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be,/The last of life, for which the first was made:/Our times are in His Hand/.”
Oh good, I had succeeded in making myself cry more . . . like expected I still felt no better.
It actually wasn’t until much later that I thought to read “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne. But when I did I found even the title to be fairly ironic as it seemed to defy the widely-accepted premise (though I am not sure who created such a trend of thought or if it was ever formally agreed upon) that it is human nature to seek validation in one’s present state. Therefore shouldn’t I have been seeking some poorly written “heart-wrencher” song that explained to me in juvenile lyrics that it was okay to cry or some such comforting nonsense? Yet, regardless of what should have been my human instinct or mourning protocol, I decided to read John Donne who explicitly forbade my mourning state.
I wonder if perhaps, mine was an issue of sexist affectation. It seems possible, if not probable, that men feel pressured to by “strong” and in turn find it difficult to cry while women, on the other hand, are nearly expected to be more emotional to the point of making up for man’s lack of emotion in her overbearing capacity.
Maybe in this way, I sought to defy my perceived role and pre-determined reactions. Maybe not. Perhaps instead mine was an issue of independent nature and I simply did not care to feel the neediness which irrevocable followed my tears. Or maybe it really did relate to the emotional and psychological repercussions of a saddened remembrance of what may have been a typical past, and the hopeless outlook that follows a repeated and consistent lack of solutions.
But these “perhaps” and “maybes” were not my concern. At that moment I very little cared for the reasons why I was mourning, nor did I hardly care for the possible reasons I felt guilty while expressing sorrow. I just wanted relief. And I figured if John Donne felt that he could forbid mourning as a whole, then I wanted to know how he thought it could be done.
As I read I found a series of three perspectives or rather paradigm shifts that served to nearly eradicate one’s desire to mourn and replaced the tendency with an “innocent mildness” that accepted it’s state of being. The first was what I would call the Profination of Spiritual Love, the second: The Expansion of the Soul, and third: The Anchor of Two Separate Souls Intertwined.
If I were to break down the phrase “Profination of Spiritual Love” basically I would say that John Donne is convincing his wife or love to “make no noise” because “tear-floods, [and] sigh-tempests move” none but rather serve as a “profanation of our joys.” In other words tears and sighing degrade their continual happiness. In the following two stanzas, a contrasting correlation is created between two types of couples, the first being “Dull sublunary lovers.../(whose souls is sense) cannot admit/Absence, because it doth remove/Those things which elemented it.” The second couple (Donne and his wife) are immediately elevated as he describes them as, “But we by a love so much refined,/That ourselves know not what it is,/Inter-assured of the mind,/Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.”
The apparent contrast is immensely effective as any lover desires to be of “a love so much refined.” But Donne’s true point was made when he explains their actions. The first couple who, “Moving of th’ earth” with their mourning brought “harms and fears.” Whereas the second with “trepidation of the spheres,/Though greater far” remained “innocent.”
As I thought through this first paradigm shift it seemed to me that I could rid my sorrow on the basis of wanting to be in possession of the most refined and true love. I suppose Donne had a good point in proving this perspective to be a potential avenue but it simply remained uncompelling to me because honestly, I didn’t care if I proved my love, I just missed Spencer. So I moved to the second perspective.
The second paradigm shift is embodied in just one stanza but is perhaps my favorite of the poem. It reads, “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./” This concept of expansion was first told to me by Spencer. This was not the first summer we had been apart. The previous summer he had gone on a four-month study abroad to the Jerusalem Center. It was during that time that he first expressed not feeling so far distant or separate but expanded. These were my first thoughts when I read John Donne’s similar assertion. It is actually this perspective which kept me from crying in the moments where I felt the need to. So lovely was the image of airy-thin sheets of gold I felt as though I could not cry but rather be grateful that Spencer’s and my love for each other was capable of withstanding the beating process of expansion. Yet, in one word I did differ, dramatically. Because I did feel a breach. Spencer’s existence and influence in my mind and even on my actions had expanded past the Atlantic Ocean but I still felt the viable absence of his physical presence. And so though I found partial comfort in Donne’s beautiful articulation I still felt the need to mourn and the guilt for the times I had.
Thus, I turned to the final perspective which was the Anchor of Two Separate Souls Intertwined. Here Donne uses a beautiful metaphor of two souls being the feet of a compass. One foot remains fixed and connected, not by location but longing, and as the other foot moves and wanders they lean in tandem and follow with a loyalty unparalleled. In a closing word, Donne says, “Thy firmness makes my circle just,/And makes me end where I begun.” And I felt calm.
I suppose in the end the question was never whether or not I should feel guilty for mourning the absence of half my heart. In the end, it was simple, though our love would expand across the ocean of insurmountable separation I could not help but lean after and long for our reuniting. Thus I would always desire to come home. But I did not have to mourn. I did not need to wonder whether or not people knew or felt sorry for me. I did not need to cry behind a closed door for fear of feeling weak. And if I did decide to mourn for a moment I did not need to feel guilty for doing so. I suppose “being emotionally healthy” is a how-to question I may never answer, but at least, for the time being, I was able to find solace in the words of a poet who knew what it meant to miss and the way in which to continue living. How? In essence, happily.
-Natalie Cherie
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