‘Adding to the World’: Colonial Adventure and Anxiety in the Writings of John Donne

In ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’ the speaker, presenting the two lovers as a sufficient world in themselves, likens the reflection of his mistress’s image in his teardrop to the process of map-making:

On a round ball A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, all.1