In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", clarify the metaphor in Stanza 3.

To understand the meaning of Stanza Three in this amazing
poem you need to understand what has already been established in Stanzas One and Two. In
these first two stanzas, the speaker is encouraging his wife to not mourn his death
loudly and urges her to part from him quietly, because it would spoil the sacredness of
their love to display their feelings publicly:

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'Twere profanation of our
joys

To tell the laity our
love.

To somehow reveal in a
very overt fashion the deep feelings they have for one another in front of other people
would lessen or cheapen the love that they had, and thus it is far better to part
quietly and not to mourn openly.

Thus in Stanza Three the
poet continues to offer proof for what he wants his wife to
do:

Moving of
th'earth brings harms and fears,

Men reckon what it did and
meant,

But trepidation of the
spheres,

Though greater far, is
innocent.

When an earthquake
occurs, men constantly ask what does it mean or what does it point towards. However,
irregularities in the movements of remote heavenly bodies is a far greater natural
disruption yet it is unobserved and harmless compared with
earthquakes.

Thus the author is encouraging his wife to be
like the heavenly bodies - his death, he knows will be incredibly significant and hard
for her to handle, yet by allowing her grief to go unobserved and not mourning she will
ensure that this tragic event will be of far greater significance than an "earthquake"
which is not as seismic an event as irregularities in the movements of planets and
stars.