The Good Morrow
Notes on
Good-Morrow
Q. Write a
critical analysis of the poem, ‘The Good-Morrow’.
Q. Explain ‘The
Good-Morrow’ as a Metaphysical poem.
The
Good-Morrow is a metaphysical love poem by John Donne. It was originally published
in his 1633 in the collection – “Songs
and Sonnets”. It is a love poem. It describes journey love from physical
love to spiritual love. It includes three stanzas. The poem revolves around two
main metaphors – ‘a couple of lovers waking into a new life’ and ‘a new world
created by their love’.
The poem
‘The Good-Morrow’ is a Metaphysical poem. It contains Metaphysical conceits.
The
speaker in the poem addresses to his beloved. The term – ‘Good-Morrow’ means ‘Good
Morning’. 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 mix, 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.
Thus, ‘The Good-Morrow’ is a love poem by Metaphysical poet –
John Donne. It is about the journey of the speaker’s love from ‘physical love’
to ‘spiritual love’. It is a Metaphysical poem because the poet has used the
metaphysical elements like – “My face
in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest”,
‘waking souls’, ‘hemispheres’, etc. The poem is a sonnet. But it is
different from the traditional forms of sonnet. It includes twenty-one lives
divided into three stanzas whereas the traditional sonnet includes fourteen
lines only.
