Page 170 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes love have been proportionately mixed and there is no ware and woof between them. They have love
equally and proportionately.
Thus the poem ends with the establishment of true friendship. After an abrupt beginning, there is
calmness at last. The couple has rejected the country pleasures and entered into a true inter-dependent
friendship. They have renounced the mundane world in order possess an unearthly world. Experience
has thought them that the true happiness can be achieved through a mutual spiritual friendship.
In the first stanza, there is the regret for past doings, in the second stanza the pleasure of discovering
something in the last stanza, the prospect/hope of doing better/using the discovery. The abrupt
beginning of the poem, the use of conceits form everyday life and myth in the first stanza, the
geographical reference of stanza two, the use of scholastic philosophy in stanza three, and ultimately
the emphasis of spiritual love continue to make it one of those poems of Donne which combine
intellect and emotion. These above motioned qualities have made the poem get a certain place in
honored, treasured lyrics written by John Donne.

John Donne’s poem, “The Good Morrow” is a coming-of-age poem that is reminiscent
of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”; the fifteenth-century Reader’s Digest version
of “The Twilight Saga” love story, minus the vampires.

Theme
The central theme in The Good-morrow is the nature and completeness of the lovers’ world. Donne
takes the everyday idea that lovers live in a world of their own with little sense of reality, and turns
it right round, so that it is the outside world that is unreal. The intensity of their love is sufficient to
create its own reality. When they watch each other, it is not, as in the outside world, out of fear, but
to complete themselves, as each one is half of the world needing the other half.
The subject
This is one of Donne’s best known poems, and a perfect sample of his way. The subject is love, love
seen as an intense, absolute experience, which isolates the lovers from reality but gives them a different
kind of awareness; a simultaneous narrowing and widening of reality.
The contents
The poem is divided in three stanzas:
In the first one the lover rejects the life he led until he met his present love. He describes it as childish
(“were we not weaned,” “childishly”) and unconscious, a kind of sleep (“Or snorted we in the Seven
Sleepers’ den”?). His past loves must not be considered as serious, since he was not completely aware
of himself at the time. So, they are rejected:
. . . But this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
The second stanza is, in contrast, a celebration of the present. Each soul has “awakened” to the other,
and has discovered a whole world in it. The union is self-sufficient; the “little room” where they are
is all the world, “an everywhere.” Consequently, the outer world is rejected, under the symbols of
maps and discoverers. Up to now, the poet has cut off his superfluous experience; past time (the first
stanza), external space (2nd stanza). He seems to be saying “Here and now.”
The third stanza shows the perfect sincerity and adequation of both lovers, and it adds a hope for the
future to that assertion of the present we have met in the first stanza. This perfect love is not only
immortal: it makes the lovers immortal, too:
If our two love be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

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