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English - II

Notes in such a manner that it is not subject to time or decay. The poet proceeds from the night-scene and
the experience of sleepy love to the morning of pure love which gives him a new life and makes him
discover a world in their little room. No navigator has ever found a world as wonderful as the world
of love. This discovery of true love is as welcome as the greeting of a new day.
Donne’s manner is that of ‘concentration’ advancing the argument in stages,reasoning till he is able
to prove his point and drive it home to the reader. Like an able lawyer he presses his point in such a
manner that it is very hard to refute it. Moreover, he marshalls his images from different sources in
such a way that the cumulative effect is irresistible. Grierson rightly points out that the imagery has
been drawn from a variety of sources, i.e. myths of everyday life, e.g. ’the seven sleepers’ den, ‘suck’d
on country pleasures’ and ‘wishing in the morning’, ‘one-little room’; the geographical world, ‘sea-
discoveries’, ‘Maps’, ‘hemispheres’; and lastly, the scholastic philosophy ‘what-ever dyes, was not
mixt equally’. The relation between one object and the other is made intellectually rather than verbally.
Donne’s method in spite of his scholarly references is not pedantic and appeals to the lay reader by
its sincerity and sharp reasoning.
Self-Assessment
1. What kind of poet is John Donne?
2. What figure of speech does the poet use by referring to “the seven sleepers den”?

10.3 Summary
• The Good Morrow’ is a typical Donnian love poem, divided into three stanzas. It’s one of those
love poems in which he praises the spiritual relation and hails it so ardently. “The Good-
Morrow” is a poem of twenty-one lines divided into three stanzas. The poet addresses the
woman he loves as they awaken after having spent the night together. The poem begins with a
direct question from the poet to the woman. Deliberately exaggerating, the poet expresses his
conviction that their lives only began when they fell in love. Before, they were mere babies at
their mothers’ breasts or were indulging in childish “country pleasures.”
• The general characteristics we attributed to Donne’s poetry in section 1 are all present in this
poem. In section two, we have seen that it follows one of Donne’s two optional views of love,
love as a nearly mystical experience which defies mutability, in contrast to the cynical attitude
of other poems (“The Flea”, or “Woman’s Constancy” among the best known). In section 3, the
metrical scheme has proved itself to be original, although slightly imperfect. Donne’s poems
gain nevertheless in conversational directness and sincerity what they lack in rhythm. In section
4 we have observed the imagery to be in perfect tune with the contents of the poem. Even
figures of speech such as parallelism or chiasm help to underline a sense of reciprocity between
the lovers. As for the metaphors and other figures of thought, they carry Donne’s seal. It is
interesting to compare the last and most important metaphor of the poem to these lines of “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soule is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
• The allusion is the same and is used in much the same way. It is not difficult to understand why
Donne was termed a “metaphysical” poet.
• The poem is a moving one: the emotion it carries can be seen even in the language, which is
overtly emphatical; there are three instances of affirmative clauses with “do” in only 21 lines
(liness 6, 16, 21). Even the adverb “everywhere” (line 11) is turned into a noun to make the
expression stronger. The impression of totality, of closeness and of rejection of the outer world
that the poem conveys finds here its perfect expression, although it can be found in other poems
by Donne, such as “The Sun Rising”, whose last three lines run thus (the poet is also in a room
with his lover, addressing the sun):

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