SONG

“Sweetest love” is a lyric made up of five stanzas each with the same rhyme scheme
(ababcddc). Each stanza develops an aspect of the problem of separation from one’s beloved.
In the first stanza the lover wards off any fear of a weakened love on his part. He does not
leave “for weariness” of the beloved (line 2), nor does he go looking for a “fitter love” for himself
(line 4). He instead compares his departure to death, saying that since he “Must die at last” (line 5),
it is better for him to practice dying by “feign’d deaths” (line 8), those short times when he is
separated from his love. Thus, he turns her fears about losing him into an assurance that she is the
very source of his existence; when he is not with her, it is like being dead.
In the second stanza, Donne uses the sun as a metaphor for his fidelity and desire to return.
He compares his leaving to the sun’s setting “Yesternight” (line 9). It left darkness behind, “yet is
here today” (line 10). If the sun can return each day, despite its lengthy journey around the world,
then the beloved can trust that the lover will return since his journey is shorter (line 12). Besides, he
will make “speedier journeys” since he has more reason to go and return than does the sun (lines
15-16).
In the third stanza, the poet turns to contemplating larger problems beyond merely being
separated from a loved one. He notes how “feeble is man’s power” (line 17) that one is unable to
add more time to his life during periods of “good fortune” (line 18). Ironically, the poet notes, we
instead add “our strength” (line 22) to misfortune and “teach it art and length” (line 23), thereby
giving bad situations power over our lives. We are so powerless that even the power we have turns
against us in bad fortune. Perhaps the suggestion here is that the lover has no choice but to go, not
having enough strength to overcome fate.
This stanza also serves as a turning point in the song. The two prior stanzas are assurances
that the lover will return quickly and faithfully. The final two stanzas focus on the harms his
beloved may cause or fear.
“When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,/But sigh'st my soul away” he says in the first line
of the fourth stanza. The beloved’s expressions of despair cause harm to her lover, he argues,
because he is so much a part of her that he is in her breath. He may also mean that her sighs
demonstrate her lack of trust in him. The same argument applies to her tears; she depletes his
“life’s blood” (line 16) when she cries. This is why she said to be “unkindly kind” with her tears
(line 15); this oxymoron emphasizes the lover’s pain in seeing the extent of her need to be with him.
He concludes the stanza complaining that “It cannot be/That thou lov’st me” (lines 21-22), since she
appears willing to “waste” his best parts (perhaps the beloved herself as she pines for him).
In the final stanza, the lover warning his beloved against future ills she may bring upon him
if she continues to fear a future without him. He urges her “divining heart” (line 25) to avoid
predicting him harm; it is possible that “Destiny may take thy part” and fulfill her fears (lines 27-
28) by leading to true dangers. He prefers that she instead see his absence as a moment in the night
when the two of them are in bed together, merely “turn’d aside to sleep” (line 30). He leaves her
with the encouragement that two people whose love is their very lifeblood can “ne’er parted be”
(line 32); they are always together in spirit.
This poem bears similarities to Donne’s other work about departure from his loved one,
“Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” The tone of the song considered here is lighter, however, and
the imagery not so controlled, poignant, or unexpected as that latter work. Nevertheless, it is worth
attempting to read this poem, like so many others of Donne’s, as a spiritual allegory. Perhaps one
again can see the lover as God and the beloved as the Church, in which case one might find a
resonance with the promised second coming of Jesus in the Christian tradition; in this tradition he
will soon return to the world even though he was crucified.