In reading for class today, I was taken with Donne’s use of metaphor. The way Donne shifts between macrocosm and microcosm is really breathtaking, in moments. I’m drawn especially to the middle stanza of “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” which moves from a round ball that becomes a globe, representing the world, and a tear, representing a person, to then joint tears, to “heaven dissolvéd so.” As in The Bait, and in other contemporary verse, water is a focal point here, as something that can speak to both a grand and a minute scale. Water is something that can “wear,” in bearing the lover’s image, as well as can “overflow/ This world.”