D-U-N!!!!!

The authors of A Valediction and Conjoined have polar opposite views on the essence of love, but similar ideas on how it is constructed. The figurative language in these poems, such as the imagery, serve to set the conflicting tones each author takes while at the same time giving the reader a similar picture of two people put together as one. On one hand, Donne finds the beauty in love while Minty stresses the unnatural state of marriage, but both describe it as a conjoined entity where two people are inexorably bound.
A Valediction relies on lighter tones and images to present love in a joyful tone while the imagery in Conjoined is dark and unnatural. Words like "joys", "airy", and "sublunary" give Donne's poem a sense of weightlessness, as if love had no burden as if on a different plane of existence. His focus is more in the soul of the lovers than their physical states, stating that "Our two souls, which are one." Instead of having a connection of the tangible kind, lovers have an ethereal connection the each other. By presenting love in this way, it is given a heavenly quality. However, Minty's poem Conjoined paints an entirely different view of love, or at least marriage. Words like "accident", "freaks", and "doomed" describe Minty's outlook on marriage, an unnatural tortured state of being . There is also no choice in the marriage Minty describes, with the two souls just being forced together. While the typical societal view of marriage much more closely resembles the descriptions of Donne, Minty doesn't even address the subject of love in marriage. Instead, Marriage is likened to a "two-headed calf" with "one body fighting to suck at its mother's teats." This twisted image exemplifies marriage as seen by Minty, two identities forced to live together and fight for what little identity there is for to be shared between the two of them. Each of her examples describe a physical connection between the anomalies, not the spiritual ones that are present in A Valediction. there is nothing but an outward appearance of constriction, which doesn't enter the spiritual essence of love. Two souls in one body causes a conflict in the being rather than opening up an opportunity for the souls to become one. Instead of the "airy" love, Minty describes the lovers movements as "heavy" which insinuates that it is a burden for the union to continue to take place, far from easy or simple. The torture of love in Minty's world conflicts almost everything that Donne had described, giving two very different descriptions of the composition of love.
Though these two authors differ in these many aspects, they show a similarity in how love comes to be. Both of the authors describe lovers as two beings becoming one entity. Donne refers to the lovers as a compass that move as the other hand moves, neither being completely free or independent from the other party. Minty refers to "Chang and Eng", a deformed double onion, and a "two-headed calf" as examples of the connectivity of husband and wife. Both of these poems relay love as a loss as a single identity in return for the creation of a new one that envelopes both parties. Neither has the ability to break away from their significant other, and both must live following the whims of the other half.Donne states, "If they be two, they are two so/ as stiff compasses are two;/ thy soul, thy fixt foot, makes no show/ to move, but doth, if th'other do." There is a lack of control if the lovers wanted to go their own way, but that isn't much of a consideration in A Valediction. However, while Donne's lovers must "obliquely run" Minty's are "fighting" instead. The obligations of love are welcomed in Donne's case, but dreaded in Minty's. Also, the object of separation, or at least the object of not being able to separate is addressed in both the poems. In A Valediction, Donne writes that, "when the other far doth roam,/ it [the other person] leans and harkens after it" while in Conjoined, the lovers, "cannot escape each other" even if they wanted to. On one hand, separation is a sad occurrence, and on the other it is an impossibility. Though the way love is viewed by each author is very different, their description of what it actually is similar.
Every simile Minty uses stresses the pain and monstrosity of conjoining two people, while the images in Donne's poem accentuates the beauty in it. Both poems define love as two different people forming into a single identity, an identity that is nearly impossible to split once it is formed. The author's views on this subject, however couldn't be more different. To Donne, Love is a happy connection of two souls, but to Minty the combination of souls is a crime against nature.