Monday Morning Required Reading. It is no secret I am a poetry addict. However, by and large I don't enjoy things written before the 20th century. I don't mind some of the Romantics - particularly Keats - but I have a rocky relationship with anything before that. So when I took a 17th century literature class in my senior year of university I did not expect to find something to fall in love with. But I did anyway. John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" captured me. It makes me tear up every time I read it, it fills me with longing, and it suits my recent moods rather well. I hope you love it as much as I do.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
    And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
    The breath goes now, and some say, No: 

So let us melt, and make no noise,
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
    To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
    Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
    Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love
    (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
    Those things which elemented it. 

[KEEP READING]