JOHN DONNE – THE-GOOD MORROW – NOTES

To some extent this is a conventional poem. It takes place at dawn, after a night
making love, and as such can be described as an AUBADE – associated with the
drowsy bliss of post-coital dawn. AUBADE is made clear in stanza 2 – ‘And now good
morrow to our waking soules,’ – and even then we are not sure quite whether these
are ‘soules’ or bodies waking. The image in stanza 3 confirms that it’s two bodies
waking – seeing his own reflection in his love’s eyes – the physical closeness is
apparent.

Donne uses rhetorical questions in stanza 1, this emphasises the depth of love –
what did they do before they met? ‘not wean’d till then? – He calls all previous
experience ‘countrey pleasures’ – unsophisticated, possible indecent pun on
‘countrey’ – this heightens the quality of their love.

The seven sleepers of line 4 refers to the myth of seven Christian youths who
escaped Roman persecution by sleeping in a cave for centuries. All these combine to
create a sensation familiar to lovers: the notion that whatever has taken place before
was in some fundamental way only fragmentary, unfulfilled, substantially
impoverished in some essentially humorous way. Donne opts for childishness as a
central metaphor until the final 3 lines of the stanza where a triple rhyme reinforces a
new point. ‘But this, all pleasures fancies bee,’ he exclaims. This love is the only
reality, everything else is imagination. Beautiful women he had formerly desired, and
enjoyed, now become mere dreams compared to the girl in this bed. In the context
of love poetry dreams are usually indicative of joy and ecstasy. Here the woman in
his bed has turned all previous lovers into dreams of her. His use of hyperbole is
instinctive.

At this point we can consider the form of address the poem adapts. There is no
dialogue, no direct speech. The frequent use of personal pronouns and emphasis on
joint experience make this clearly a love poem. It deals with what is in the poet’s
mind. Donne gives us a recreation of a stage in their developing love, the moment
when he realises how significant this event is and conveys that realisation to his
lover. It is a new dawn, a ‘good morrow’.

Close on the affirmation of this new dawn at the start of stanza two comes
strenghtening claims. Their souls are watchful, not out of fear but because love now
controls all they see. They love to see only that which love dictates they see; ‘For
love, all love of other sights controules’. Donne plays with space in that the lovers
can make a universe of the smallest room. ‘Let us possesse one world, each hath one,
and is one.’ Smallness and vastness of Elizabethan world.

The final stanza begins with the observation already touched on of the lovers being
able to see themselves reflected in the others’ eye. In some way their souls have

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been exchanged. Using the commonplace that the face is a voice to the heart, he
proudly proclaims their superiority and unity as two halves of one sphere:

Where can we finde two better hemispheares/Without sharpe North, without

declining West?

The addition of the negative adjectives to the points of the compass, (‘Sharpe’ for
cold and ‘declining’ for sunset) appears to be an almost humorous assertion that the
lovers have only positive qualities.

The final triplet of the poem is difficult, and’Dyes’ is to be found spelled both ways in
differing editions. Although initially this might strike a new student of Donne as a
serious issue, it really doesn’t present any difficulty. The ambiguity is really what
matters here. Their love appears to be so immense, so magnificent, as to be
immortal.

The Good Morrow: Central 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.

Commentary

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.

The first stanza

The first stanza of the poem is where the speaker, who is one of the lovers talking to
his partner, looks back to when they were not in love. That time seems unreal. They
were children, naïve, asleep even. Whatever pleasures they experienced were mere
unrealities (‘fancies’) compared to what they have now. Any beauty (we presume any
female beauty) was, again, a mere dream to be set against the present intense and
concrete reality.

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The second stanza

The second stanza of the poem suggests that the lovers have woken now into true
reality, out of the shadows of night. In fact, they make their own reality. The room
where they are in bed is their world, and nothing exists outside its walls. Yes, the
poet says, there may be worlds out there: let discoverers go and find them or map-
makers draw them, but let us use our time possessing our own private world.

The third stanza

One complete world suggests that each is a hemisphere perfectly complementing

the other. The poet concludes by suggesting that if they can stay totally constant as
lovers, then they cannot die, since, according to current thinking, only what is
contrary or of different measure can disintegrate. A perfect harmony or
completeness will be theirs.

Imagery and symbolism

As is usual with a Donne poem, the argument in The Good-morrow is carried on

through the images or conceits used. So there is a density of imagery, and we have
to pick out the central one first. This is clearly the iamage at the centre of the poem,
the microcosmic one, in l.11:

And makes one little roome, an every where.

Map imagery

The geographical images in the poem are straightforward. Donne lived in an age of
sea voyages undertaken in order to discover new lands. Map-makers were kept busy
drawing routes or making globes on which the maps were fastened. These have
some validity for others, but not for the lovers. The geographical imagery is extended
into the points of the compass (l.18):

 North symbolises bitterness and discord

 West symbolises dying

The lovers’ world does not contain these directions. This is Donne's conceit. It is
based on hyperbole – taking an idea to its limit so it becomes an outrageous
exaggeration.

Other images

Some of the other images are more complicated.

 The idea of one lover being reflected in the other's eyes is an important one
(ll.15, 16). Donne combines this with the preceding image of globes.

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  Then he extends this to the fact that ‘plain hearts’, by which he means honest
hearts, show also in the faces of the lovers. There is no pretence, which is why
there is no fear (l.9). ‘Perfect love casts out fear’ says the Bible (1 John 4:18),
and this is echoed here.

Donne often uses almost religious language in his love poems.

 Christian belief states that only God is unchanging James 1:17, but here on
earth, the place where everything is supposed to change, the poet is
supposing they can defy this in their godlike love (ll.20-21).

The first stanza contains several interesting images:

 babies at the breast and being weaned, suggesting the immaturity of their
previous emotional life

 the ‘seven sleepers’, an allusion to a legend which tells how seven young
Christian men from Ephesus hid in a cave during a persecution. The cave was
sealed up, but the young men fell asleep for several centuries – a sort of Rip
van Winkle fable.

Language & Tone

Dramatic

Donne's poetry is typically dramatic. One good way of seeing this is to look at the
beginning of each poem. In The Good-morrow the ‘I’ voice jumps out and hits us
with a question to which he demands an answer, even though the question posed is
a semi-rhetorical question - the other person is never allowed a minute to reply!

This is in great contrast to the much softer second stanza. It starts off with a note of
restrained triumph and finishes with a persuasive plea to enjoy their world. There are
no questions any more.

Doubt

The poem seems to end on a note of some doubt: ‘If … or ... ’. Perhaps after all
Donne cannot any longer keep up the conceit that nothing will come to change their
love or intrude upon it.

Structure and versification:

Stanza form

The stanza form is regular, each stanza consisting of seven lines, and rhyming
ababccc. The c-rhyme is a little suspect at times- ‘gone’, ‘showne’, ‘one’ are more eye

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rhymes than sound ones. English pronunciation has changed somewhat since
Donne's day, so that a final ‘-ly’ did actually rhyme with ‘I’.

Metre

 The last line of each stanza is an alexandrine, i.e. it has twelve syllables

 The remaining lines are all pentameters, having ten syllables.

 Donne frequently avoids any smoothly flowing rhythm: the ‘I’ voice is too
changeable to allow that. Even though a line like:

Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

is technically an iambic pentameter, the number of monosyllables and the consonant

clusters make it a clumsy line to read, but that is deliberate: the world outside is a
clumsy place, in contrast to a smooth world. Without sharpe North, without declining
West? Which is perfectly balanced in the middle by the comma.

Revision
 3 stanzas – alternate rhyme (1/2 rhyme) for 1st four lines – finishes with a
triplet.
 Use of personal pronoun ‘I’ to make the poem personal. Combines rhetorical
questions to show that this love is true – did not live before meeting each
other – ‘I wonder’.
 Uses allusion to legend of 7 young men of Ephesus who took refuge in a cave
during a persecution, they were found alive two centuries later. Strengthens
the idea that each had not really lived before meeting each other.
 Microcosm – Their love makes ‘an everywhere’ of ‘one little room’.
 Imagery – Map makers/discoverers – this was important in early 17th century
and Donne says that all of that is unimportant to these two lovers – ‘Let us
possesse one world, each hath one, and is one’. Reinforces the depth of their
love – may be hyperbole yet it has a convincing tone. There is much drama in
stanza 2 with the dismissal of the most important issues of the day with the
repetition of ‘Let’ at beginning of last 3 lines.
 Love creates this microcosm.
 Includes their ‘soules’ – another common image for Donne – More easily
imagined, perhaps in the early 17th century than now.
 The central conceit is that the lovers form the world – both hemispheres – this
massive imagery is reinforced by the use of the tiny image of ‘My face in thine
eye, thine in mine, appeares,’.
 Their love will transcend the mortal world as it is complete and true, their love
will never die, ‘What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;’. They have become one,
‘our two loves be one’.
 Theme – spiritual/true love/perfect love
 Tone – dramatic/sincere

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