The Good-Morrow

The Good-Morrow Summary

The Good-Morrow is a metaphysical love poem by John Donne, originally published in his 1633 collection of Songs and Sonnets. This three stanza poem revolves around two main metaphors, a couple of lovers waking into a new life, and a new world created by their love.As the poem opens the speaker, after being woken up together from the night spent together, tells his beloved before they met each other what they had done was all childish play. They were merely babies nursing from the mother’s breast and indulging in country pleasures. He reflects that those parts of their lives to be as worthless as the ones spent in slumber by the seven sleepers of Ephesus. He compares their true love with the past pleasures and finds all the past pleasures as fancies. He, moreover, asserts that he had only dreamt of the true beauty, that is, his beloved whom he has got now.

A glorious and happy greeting to their soul opens the second stanza. They are now awaken in the true world of love and they do not have to be fearful and jealous in terms of losing each other. Here, the speaker and his beloved have moved to the spiritual world of love. They are now complete and other beauties of the materialistic world do not distract them. Their small room where they make love is the whole world for them now. He does not consider the new discoveries of the sea an important thing now because for him his beloved is the pure world of love and discoveries.

The speaker in the third stanza praises the strong bond of love they share. He can see his image in her eyes and she is in his eyes. Their mutual love reflects their image so well that their hearts are clearly seen in their eyes. When the world is divided into hemispheres, their love is united and crosses all the boundaries of the physical world. At the end of the poem, the speaker applauses the immortality of their love. He says that when two things mixes the purity of the matter loses and it becomes weak. But, their love is not like any mixture, but the mixture of platonic love. So, their bondage cannot be slackened, and their love cannot be killed as it is immortal and pure love.

Status: Print but  Not published

Explanation:

1.  

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

Answer:

     These lines have been taken from the poem “The Good-Morrow”. The poem begins with a direct question from the poet to the woman. The poet expresses his conviction that their lives only began when they fell in love.  

  The poem opens with the male speaker wondering by his “troth”  – that is, his good faith – what he and his beloved did before they loved. In other words, he wonders what their lives were like before they met and fell in love. He wonders, in lines 2-3, whether, in their earlier lives, they not fully mature and whether they took pleasure in childish, simple things. Or he wonders if they snored, like the famous Biblical seven sleepers, who slept for 187 years. He then suddenly says that all these speculations must be true, because he now realizes that all the earlier pleasures he enjoyed, before he fell in love, were merely “fancies” – that is, insubstantial, imaginary fantasies, not real, substantive pleasure.

   As the poem opens the speaker, after being woken up together from the night spent together, tells his beloved before they met each other what they had done was all childish play. They were merely babies nursing from the mother’s breast and indulging in country pleasures. He reflects that those parts of their lives to be as worthless as the ones spent in slumber by the seven sleepers of Ephesus. He, moreover, asserts that he had only dreamt of the true beauty, that is, his beloved whom he has got now.

2. Where can we find two better hemispheres,

                Without sharp north, without declining west?

Answer: These lines have been taken from the poem “The Good-Morrow”. The poet tells "Where can we find two better hemispheres/without sharp north, without declining west?"

     Since a hemisphere is only half of a sphere Donne is drawing a traditional yet poetic image of the two lovers only being half of the entire whole. Donne is not complete without his love, and she is not complete without him.

The poem continues, "Whatever dies, was not mixed equally". Donne is explaining that true love cannot die, but that true love also requires reciprocal effort. Each lover needs to contribute equally, and only if the love is true can it never die.

  As they gaze into each other’s eyes, each sees a tiny image of the other reflected in the lover’s eye, and “true plain hearts” that “in the faces rest.”  Their love is spiritual, not earthly, and so is not subject to coldness (“sharp North”) or decrease (“declining West”).

Short Question:

1. Country pleasure.

Answer:

The Good-Morrow by John Donne, who wrote "The Good-Morrow" Country Kingdom of England Language English language Publication date 1633 "The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. Written while Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn, the poem is one of his earliest works and is thematically considered to be the "first" work in Songs and Sonnets.

  In that poem, the phrase is referring to pleasures that are really not sophisticated. They are  pleasures that country people would enjoy but that more "civilized" people would look down on.

This really goes witht the idea of this poem as a whole.The speaker is saying that he and his love were nothing until they fell in love. He compares them to children who hadn't grown up. In the phrase you cite, he compares them to country people who had not really become civilized or sophisticated.

  

2. Allusion of seven Sleepers.

Answer:

The Good-Morrow by John Donne, who wrote "The Good-Morrow" Country Kingdom of England Language English language Publication date 1633 "The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. Written while Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn, the poem is one of his earliest works and is thematically considered to be the "first" work in Songs and Sonnets.

  In the Christian tradition, the Seven Sleepers were young men who fled persecution at the hands of the Roman Emperor Decius. They retired to a remote cave to pursue a simple life of prayer and piety. When Decius heard about this, he punished the young men's defiance by having the entrance to the cave completely sealed. At the time, the men inside were blissfully unaware of what was going on, as they were all fast asleep. Nearly 200 years later, the mouth of the cave was opened, and the Seven Sleepers miraculously woke up, thinking they had only been asleep for a single day.

 Donne uses the legend of the Seven Sleepers to reinforce the poem's central conceit. The speaker and his lover have spent their whole lives as if in a deep slumber, but they have woken up at long last and realized that they belong to each other. This is not just an expression of their intense physical passion; it also represents a true spiritual awakening of the lovers' respective souls.

3. Explain poet sense of completeness.

Answer:

  

     The Good-Morrow by John Donne, who wrote "The Good-Morrow" Country Kingdom of England Language English language. "The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. Written while Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn, the poem is one of his earliest works and is thematically considered to be the "first" work in Songs and Sonnets.

    The Good-morrow is one of Donne's happy love songs, celebrating the joys of a completely unified love. We can compare it, therefore, with The Sunne Rising and The Extasie. If the lovers are so unchanging in their love, they will achieve immortality, since only what changes, dies. The poem is driven by a central image: that the two lovers make up a complete world. Nothing really exists outside of their world; it is self-sufficient, self-absorbing.

4. Present poet argument why their love cannot be lessened?

Answer:

     The Good-Morrow by John Donne, who wrote "The Good-Morrow" Country Kingdom of England Language English language. "The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. Written while Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn, the poem is one of his earliest works and is thematically considered to be the "first" work in Songs and Sonnets.

       In Donne's poetry that develops the idea of immature love versus mature love.  In "The Good Morrow," the speaker of the poem describes the two lovers' lives before they met as childish.  The two lovers before meeting each other "sucked on country pleasures," and they were not "weaned." Their previous loves with others were immature, unsophisticated, and fantastical.  It was as if they each had been sleeping until they met.

       Mature love is described in the third and last stanza of the poem. The two lovers are united body and soul, so much so that they see the reflection of themselves in each other's eyes.  Here the speaker describes a love that is perfectly reciprocated and therefore will last until eternity:

             If our two loves be one, or thou and I

         Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

Unlike the immature or inferior loves of their pasts, the lovers now share a more perfect love because it is spiritual as well as physical. In this way, their love is self-sufficient.

5. Justification of the title?

Answer:

The Good-Morrow by John Donne, who wrote "The Good-Morrow" Country Kingdom of England Language English language Publication date 1633.

The good morrow is always to be anticipated, for the speaker's love is so consuming that the promise of another day brings the prospect of more intense love. the speaker dismisses past actions and lovers as inconsequential

"The Good Morrow" emphasizes that these lovers are waking up into a new chapter of their lives, moving from physical pleasures into a new era of passionate, reciprocal love that combines both bodily lust and spiritual compatibility.