English & Literature

What form does John Donne use in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning?

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John Donne's poem, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, has a form that consists of nine stanzas using strange metrical patterns that are placed in juxtasposition with a regular rhyme scheme (ABAB). What this does, then, is to provide an unsettling effect. Each four-lined stanza is free of contrivance and ornamentation, and is in iambic tetrameter meter.