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:
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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.