"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

This poem describes death as a journey. The title is symbolic in that valediction means farewell. Death is a farewell to life. The poem says that it doesn't do any good to cry over death because it has already happened. Death is part of the circle of life, in which we begin and end in the same place or way. The speaker refuses to admit that his lover is gone. In this sense, dying is figurative throughout the poem. The poem explains that we cannot live without dying and that death itself is a journey.