"A measure of great poetry is its ability to transcend time and place". Donne's poetry has been loved and hated by many people throughout history, but most of all it's been read. He still remains one of the most renowned poets of his time due to his poetic ability and partly also because of his rebellious writing styles and outrageous comparisons made in his work. No matter where you are or when it is that you read Donne's work it will always appeal to you and will always be relevant due to the universality of his themes. Love and religion will always engage the reader and therefore it follows that his great poetry transcends time and place. .
Love transcends the centuries, national boundaries and race. This, coupled with Donne's poetic prowess has helped to create a great poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning which also transcends time and place. In the poem Donne's basic argument was that "most" people's relationships are built on purely sensual things. If they are not together all the time the relationship breaks down. "Dull sublunary lovers love/ (Whose soule is sense) cannot admit/ Absence, because it doth remove/ Those things which elemented It". Donne asserts that the love between him and his wife is different- it is not a purely sensual relationship, but something deeper, a love of the mind rather than a love of the body. "Dull sublunary lovers love/ (Whose soule is sense) cannot admit/ Absence, because it doth remove/ Those things which elemented it./ But we by a'love, so much refin'd/ That we ourselves know not what it is/ Inter-assured of the mind,/ Care lesse, eyes, lips, and hands to misse. This love can live on, even though sometimes the lovers cannot be close to each other at all times. When people are in love, their partners become the "world" in their eyes. This was true then and it still is now. .
Donne uses some very evocative imagery in this universally relevant poem.