Compare how the authors of two texts you have studied present ideas about romantic commitment.

In ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, John Donne, a renowned metaphysical poet proposes that two souls in a relationship ‘are two so/ As stiff twin compasses are two’:Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show    To move, but doth, if the other do. And though it in the center sit,    Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it,    And grows erect, as that comes home. Here, Donne suggests that regardless of distance, circumstance or time, romantic couples are inextricably linked on a supernatural level. This can be seen as a very traditional concept of romantic commitment, though it is uncomfortably gendered to suggest unerring female submission, without reciprocal male fidelity; though the two souls may ‘endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion’, one is free to roam while the other must stay still, if we apply tropes of gender politics of Donne’s time of writing, it becomes evident which foot is which. The ‘[leaning]’ and ‘[hearkening]’ of the centre foot may further conjure images of wartime wives pining for their husbands, and its growing ‘erect’ upon the other’s return suggests a rectification of balance, thus implying that the centre foot cannot function irrespective of the roaming foot. Commitment in this case seems to be promised by the male speaker, though expected to be demonstrated in a far more concrete way by the female subject. Therefore commitment adopts a duel meaning, though it is necessary that a woman commit both in body and spirit, a man’s spiritual commitment is expected to be enough.A similar expectation can be seen to be at play in Scott F. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the character of Tom Buchanan:‘I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time’Tom’s ‘[sprees]’ are not all too dissimilar to Donne’s speaker’s ‘[roaming]’, though in a far more explicitly adulterous way. He too may ‘roam’ and sleep with other women, but ‘in [his] heart’ he remains committed, just as Donne’s speaker will ‘end where [he] begun’. The subsequent hypocrisy of his anger about Daisy’s infidelity with Gatsby is perhaps therefore symptomatic of the gendered expectation that bodily and spiritual commitment be much more inextricable in the female role. If a woman loses one, she loses all. Moreover, it is not just Daisy upon whom Tom impresses these expectations, but his mistress, Myrtle: ‘He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick.’ This confirms that this expectation is not one of marriage, but one of gender. Gatsby’s commitment to Daisy— though far more unwavering in its dedication— is no less problematic. When we are told that he ‘read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy's name’ and that ‘Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay’, though we may assume that Gatsby is assuming the role of steadfast centre foot in Donne’s compass metaphor, it may well be said that the Daisy to whom he has both spiritually and bodily committed himself is that of his memory, not of reality: ‘There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams […] No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.’Ultimately, though both Tom and Gatsby can be seen to commit themselves to Daisy with ‘all [their] heart’, Gatsby’s is a ‘ghostly’ one, and the commitment he maintains is to a woman he once knew who no longer exists. Romantic commitment in these cases is infuriatingly inconsistent and its expectations disparately gendered. To close with Donne, if romantic commitment between souls endures ‘like gold to airy thinness beat’, it might be more accurate in these cases to ignore the weighted inflection of the word ‘gold’ stressed by the iambic tetrameter and instead focus on the ‘airy thinness’ to which it is reduced.