The Compass and the Circle

Dear Reader,

There is a poem I return to infrequently, written four centuries ago by an Englishman named John Donne, and it contains what I believe is one of the most quietly profound observations about love and life ever committed to paper.
Donne wrote it as a farewell to his wife Anne before a long journey — not a lament, but an argument. He wanted to convince her, through the sheer force of reason and beauty, that their separation was not a breaking but a stretching. He called it “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” and its closing image has stayed with me.

He compared the two of them to the legs of a draftsman’s compass — the instrument we used as children to draw perfect circles. His wife, he said, was the fixed foot at the center—Steady—Unwavering— Leaning slightly toward the roaming leg with quiet, faithful attention. And he was the other foot — the one that swings wide, traces great arcs, ventures far out into the unknown. Yet no matter how far that wandering leg travels, it is always tethered to the center.

And when the circle is complete, it comes to rest precisely where it began.

Thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end, where I have begun.

I have known people built like each of those two legs. The adventurers among us — the ones restless with curiosity, drawn toward the next horizon, energized by the unfamiliar — can sometimes mistake their ranging for independence. But the wide circle is only possible because of the fixed point. Without the anchor at the center, there is no circle at all.

There is only drift.

The poem also draws a distinction that I think speaks directly to our times. Donne contrasts what he calls “sublunary” love — earthly, surface-level, entirely dependent on physical presence — with a love so refined that it is “inter-assured of the mind.” The first kind collapses the moment distance enters the picture. The second kind does not merely survive distance. It expands through it, the way gold beaten by a craftsman’s hammer becomes something thin and luminous and more beautiful for having been tested.

We live in an age that celebrates the adventurer, the disruptor, the one who ranges farthest from the familiar. And there is genuine nobility in that impulse. But Donne reminds us that the most enduring lives are not the ones that simply roam — they are the ones that roam and return. The ones shaped by a fixed point worthy of the journey home.

I think about the communities our newspapers serve in exactly these terms. Every small Wisconsin town is someone’s fixed foot. The place that leans and harkens after its children when they wander, and grows quietly upright when they come home. Our job, as community journalists, is to honor that center — to be, in some small way, the instrument that helps a place know itself and hold its circle true.

Donne wrote his poem as a farewell. But read carefully, it is really a love letter to homecoming.

I know this because I have lived it. I am, by nature and by disposition, the ranging foot — drawn toward the next idea, the next negotiation, the next horizon. I have chased stories and strategies across decades, across time zones, across the better part of a lifetime. And through all of it, there has been a fixed point.

She does not make noise about it. She does not demand recognition for the steadiness she provides. She simply holds the center — leaning and harkening after — so that every circle I have ever drawn has had somewhere true to end.
Whatever I have managed to accomplish in this life, the geometry of it belongs to her.