Question: Valediction: Forbidding Mourning? What is the conceit in this poem?\n\n\nAs virtuous men pass mildly away,\nAnd whisper to their souls to go,\nWhilst some of their sad friends do say,\n"The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"\n\n\nSo let us melt, and make no noise,\nNo tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;\n'Twere profanation of our joys\nTo tell the laity our love.\n\n\nMoving of the earth brings harms and fears,\nMen reckon what it did and meant;\nBut trepidation of the spheres,\nThough greater far, is innocent.\n\n\nDull sublunary lovers' love\n(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit\nAbsence, because it doth remove\nThose things which elemented it.\n\n\nBut we, by a love so much refined\nThat our selves know not what it is,\nInter-assured of the mind,\nCare less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.\n\n\nOur two souls therefore, which are one,\nThough I must go, endure not yet\nA breach, but an expansion.\nLike gold to airy thinness beat.\n\n\nIf they be two, they are two so\nAs stiff twin compasses are two:\nThy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show\nTo move, but dot

Answer: The last three quatrains (of which only part of the first made it into your question) are a good example of a conceit, in which the metaphor of the compass is developed at length.
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