A Study of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

To cite this article: LI Zhengshuan & GUO Xiaoqian. (2021). A Study of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Asia-Pacific Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 1(4), 001-008, DOI: 10.53789/j.1653-0465.2021.0104.001

To link this article: https://doi.org/10.53789/j.1653-0465.2021.0104.001

Abstract: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is one of John Donne’s representative works. It displays the poet’s profound love for his wife by using ingenious conceit and defamiliarization techniques. The poet uses the image of compasses to express his spectacular ideas and his unusual view of love. Based on the theory of multimodal discourse analysis developed by systemic functional linguisticians, this paper interprets the poem from four aspects: visual mode, auditory mode, verbal mode and multimodal meaning integration, so as to understand the poem from the perspective of form, sound and meaning comprehensively, enriching the connotation of the poem.

Keywords: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”; John Donne; multimodal discourse analysis

LI Zhengshuan & GUO Xiaoqian Number 4 APJHSS.pdf