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Unit 10: Poetry : John Donne’s “The Good Morrow”

to the woman. Deliberately exaggerating, the poet expresses his conviction that their lives only began Notes
when they fell in love. Before, they were mere babies at their mothers’ breasts or were indulging in
childish “country pleasures.”
In the opening stanza, the poet expresses his wonder as to what he and his beloved did before they fell
in love with each other. He becomes surprised remembering their past love experiences. He compares
the love experiences of himself and his beloved with ‘weaning’, falsely sucking country pleasures’ and
‘snorting.’ The reference to these three physical activities indicates that they spent a life of worldly
enjoyment. But now the poet using the conjunction ‘But’ makes a contrast and say’s that all these past
physical activities seem to be utterly meaningless. The closing two lines of the first stanza imply that
though the poet indulged himself in ‘country pleasures’, he has never been unmindful to perfect beauty
of ideal spiritual love, which he always desired and has finally ‘got’ in his present beloved.
Obviously there is a shift from physical to spiritual love, sleeping to waking period, sensuous
appearances to ideal reality and as if from platonic cave to the world of light in the poet and his
beloved. Here the poet seems to have touched the metaphysics of Plato. In his metaphysics, Plato at
first takes something concrete such as man, but soon he leaps into abstract namely the Form of
man. Similarly Donne also begins with physical love and soon he turns to Platonic or metaphysical
love.

What does the title of this poem the Good Morrow means?

The first stanza contains several Donnian elements. It opens abruptly with an explosive question.
This abrupt colloquial beginning, which is so characteristic of Donne startles us and captures our
attention. Another noticeable thing is that Donne swears his true relation – ‘I wonder by my troth’.
Here he is unconventional. Any of his contemporary of Elizabethan poets might swear to God, but
Donne has not done it. Then there are the references of physical union and the use of imageries in the
following three lines. The fourth line contains a legendary conceit,a legend that tells of seven young
men of Ephesus who took refuge in a cave during the persecution of Diocletian and were entombed
there. They were found alive two centuries later. Here Donne compares himself and his beloved with
the seven sleepers. Here he is cynical when he utters the word ‘did’. Surely the word ‘did’ includes
the connotations of sexual doing – what did we ever do with the time?
The second stanza begins with hail and celebration. The unconscious past of flesh is over and a new
conscious spiritual relationship begins. So the speaker cerebrates the present. “Now good morrow to
our waking souls”. He also makes declaration that their souls have also learnt not to spy one another.
That the married women or men involve in extra-marital affair was a dominant theme in the
Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. So, fear only works in sensual lovers as motivation for watching
over each other, least the other should become unfaithful to his or her mate. But the speaker and his
beloved have overcome this fear and a peaceful satisfaction prevails their love. And for their faithful
love they will control the temptations of other things. They love so faithfully and ardently that their
love has the force to be merged into the universal love and to move out to become “an every where”.
As spiritual lovers, the poet and his beloved are indifferent to earthly pleasures and possessions – let
the sea-lovers and map-lovers do what they like to do. The lovers want to be happy with their joint
world though they have their individual worlds but their individual worlds are fused into a single
world. Now they are the joint owners of a single world.
Here in this stanza, we find the presence of imagery from the contemporary geographical world.
That is to say the contemporary geographical interest of the explorers.
The third stanza opens with endearing words from the speaker. The two lovers stand so closely that
their respective faces are reflected in each others eyes. The simplicity of their heart is also reflected in
their faces, which are conceived as two hemispheres of their world. But their world of love is so
unearthly that its hemispheres are free from coldness and decay. They are not afraid of separation or
break up of their “relation, because” ‘what ever dyes, was not mixt equality’. The ingredients of their

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