The Benefit of Writing Paraphrase

In my post Goodbyes, No Tears, I paraphrased John Donne's poem, A Valediction: Forbidden Morning. One of my commentors asked what benefit I gleaned from the paraphrase.I thought I'd respond in a new post.

The most obvious answer is that I was able to see how clearly form is tied to meaning. You just don't get as much out of my three paragraph summarization of what happens in the poem. The connotations behind the words in the poem, the flowing rhymes and the feel of the meter; these all contribute unique meaning to the poem itself and cannot be accurately captured in a paraphrase.

Despite this, I still found that paraphrasing the work forced me to spend more time digesting it. I looked up words instead of glossing over what I thought the intended meaning was. One example is the word melt in the fifth line. One definition of melt is actually to soften as in to make more mild. I was then able to understand the intended meaning of the stanza better. My interpretation of the poem greatly depends on the meaning of this word: that Donne would like his lover's and his parting to be soft and sweet, not stormy and emotional. So, paraphrasing was very useful to me in understanding the poem.

Goodbyes, No Tears

I want to share my paraphrase on John Donne's A Valediction: Forbidding Morning that I wrote for ENGL 251. Here is a link to the original poem. I'd love some feedback. Let me know what you think.

Good men die so gently that their friends are not even sure if they have gone. Just like their souls part quietly from their body, let’s be mild in our parting, not dramatic so as to show off our love. Crying and raging would profane all the joys of our love. Earthquakes are dramatic and give people cause for concern, but by contrast the motion of the spheres surrounding the earth, even though much greater, goes mostly unnoticed.

Lovers of this world possess a love that is created out of tangible togetherness and their five senses, and so their love cannot permit their being apart because it is created out of being together, but our love is so sure and faithful in the mind that it doesn’t matter if we’re physically separated.

Our souls are like one soul, so when we’re apart, it’s like one soul expanding, not two breaking apart, much like gold when beaten, flattens really thin but doesn’t break. Even if our souls are two separate entities, you are like the side of a compass that stands still in the center while I, as the other side of the compass, draw a circle around you. You attend to my movements while I must go away and circle you, but by staying where you are, you draw me back to you.