CC-IV: The Good Morrow as a Metaphysical Love poem

  In the poem "The Good Morrow" John Donne explores essentially the nature of complex love-experience. Two kinds of experience are involved, one opposed to the other. The basic contrast is between life without love(i.e. life with ordinary simple pleasures) and life of passionate love. The first four lines state through a series of interrogatives the first kind which is dubbed as childish, and is, therefore, rejected in favour of the second kind, which has come as a revelation to the speaker-lover-

            "I wonder by my troth, What thou, and I

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

              But sucked on country pleasure, childishly?

              Or snorted we in the seven sleepers den?"

        The poet builds up the superstructure of the poem on this basic contrast and goes on to suggest the unquestionable superiority of life of love.

                Whereas the first stanza suggests the unfeeling, immature foolish souls almost asleep, and night time, wholly unaware of the possibilities of love, the second stanza brings in the idea of the morning following the night, and the poet wishes to the souls now fully awake:

                "And now good morrow to our waking souls

                 Which watch not one another out of fear".

With the day-break both souls recognise each other fully. The physical light of the day is also simultaneously the light of love. Which dawns upon them bringing about the true realization of love.

                In order to prove an experience of passionate, whole-hearted and spiritual love, the poet makes a contrast between the world of love and the geographical world. To him, the world discovered by lovers is as good as the new world discovered by the sea-discovers-

                "Let sea-discovers to new world have gone, 

                  Let Maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,

                  Let us posses our world, each hath one, and is one". 

The sea-discoverers undertake strenuous voyages to distant corners of the earth, and thereby, charting out the geographical regions in the form of maps and globes, they are unaware of the vast world of spiritual experience shared by lovers. In other words each of lovers is an explorer in his or her own world of love. Nevertheless, the individual worlds of the lovers merge into one world. Their two individual identities become 'one' in love.

        That the world of love is a microcosm of the macrocosm, an epitome of the world at large is further suggested by the poet in the lines: 

                        "For love, all love other sights controls, 

                         And makes one little room, an everywhere". 

    In the last stanza the poet proceeds to prove the superiority of the lovers' world thus: 

                        "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

                          And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,

                        Where we can find two better hemispheres 

                        without sharp North, without declining West?

                        Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;

                        If our two loves be one, or thou and I

                        Love so alike, that one do slacken, none can die".

        The poet, in terms of using conceit after conceit, compares the reflection of each lover's face into the eye of the other to a hemisphere, and the two reflections together making up a better world than the geographical one -"without sharpe North and declining west" which symbolize decay and death. The two hemispheres of the lovers are without these, suggesting thereby that the world of love is not subject to decay and death.

                Again, in the last three lines, the poet proclaims the supremacy of love by drawing upon the philosophy of the medical scholar St. Thomas Acqninas. Acqninas says that a thing is subject to decay and death only when the elements of the thing are not properly mixed up or amalgamated ("whatever dies, was not mixed equally,"). Following this philosophy, the poet seeks to suggest that the physical world, in which the elements are not properly mixed up, is bound to die, but not the lovers' world in which the mixture of the elements has been made in equal proportions. The two soulds being one world and mixed in equal proportions become immortal in love. To be precise, it is beyond death.

                    "The Good Morrow", thus, illustrates all the attributes, which, according to sir Grierson, have earned the epithet 'metaphysical poet' for John Donne. The imagery of the poem is derived from varied source-myth("the seven sleepers' den"), everyday life("sucked on country pleasures"), the geographical world("sea-discovers", "Maps", "hemispheres") and lastly, the Scholastic philosophy("whatever dies was not mixed equally"). The poem, therefore, through a method of ratiocination, probes deep into the psychology of the lovers' experience, and thereby, emerging as a true metaphysical poem.

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