– Hridhya P
Summary
The poet begins with an image of good men dying quietly, softly letting their souls to leave their bodies. These virtuous deaths are so unpredictable that the dying men’s friends disagree about whether or not the men have stopped breathing yet.The speaker asks that he and the lover he’s bidding farewell to should take these deaths as a model, and part ways silently. They should not be tempted to weep and sigh excessively. In fact, grieving so openly would degrade their private love by declaring it to ordinary people.Natural earthly disturbances, such as earthquakes, hurt and scare people. Ordinary people notice these events happening and wonder what they mean. However, the movements of the heavens, while being larger and more important, go unnoticed by mostly.Boring, common people feel a kind of love that, because it depends on emotional connection, can’t handle separation. Being physically apart takes away the physical bond that their love depends on. The speaker and his lover, on the other hand, experience a more rare and special kind of bond. They can’t even understand it themselves, but they are bonded mentally, certain of one another on a non-physical level. And as they bonded mentally deep, it matters less to them when their bodies are separated.The souls of the lovers are made together by love itself. Although the speaker must leave, their souls will not be broken apart. Instead, they will expand to cover the distance between them, as fine metal expands when it is hammered.If their souls are merely individual, they are never linked in the way the legs of a drawing compass are linked. The soul of the lover is like the stationary foot of the compass, which does not appear to move itself but actually does respond to the other feet’s movement.This stationary compass foot sits in the center of a paper.When the other compass foot moves further away, the stationary foot changes its angle to lean in that direction,as if longing to be nearer to its partner.As the moving foot returns, closing the compass, the stationary foot stands straight again, seeming alert and excited.The speaker’s lover, he argues, will be like his stationary foot, while he himself must travel a circuitous, indirect route.Her fixed position provides him with the stability to create a perfect circle, which ends exactly where it began—bringing the speaker back to his lover once again as he promises.
By Hridhya P
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