Zusammenfassung der Ressource
GOOD MORROW
- I wonder, by my truth, 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. If ever any beauty I
did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas
but a dream of thee.
- The poem opens
dramatically and rather
explosively with a series
of short exclamatory
questions, the first
containing an oath,
which the lover
addresses to the woman
beside him. The broken
lines contain the
"rhythms of impassioned
speech.".
- The first four lines convey the speaker's
amazed surprise at his new discovery of
love and his scorn for his former,
unbelievably naive ignorance. To achieve
sincerity of feeling, then, Donne abandons
the conventional complimentary love-song
opening and startles us, rather, with
energetic, colloquial, and realistic language.
- the poet asks his beloved how they used to spend their
lives before they had met each other. With his beloved
in arms, the poet realizes how empty his life was
before. He considers that phase of their lives to be as
meaningless as the ones spent in slumber by the seven
sleepers of Ephesus in the den when they were trying
to escape the wrath of the tyrant Emperor Decius.
- Line four, "Or snorted we in the seven sleepers den?", alludes to
the legend of the seven Christian youths of Ephesus who hid in a
cave during the persecutions of Decius and slept there for more
than two hundred years, awaking, amazed, in the fifth century to
find Christianity triumphant.
- An aubade, or morning song usually
"sung" by a lover to his mistress
after a night of love. Donne takes
this conventional form and gives it
his own unusual treatment
- Although at first sight the short
poem appears simple and lucid, yet
it is "actually the densest and most
tightly organized of Donne's major
love poems."
- “The Good Morrow” is one of his best
poems which has been awarded with
some magnificent traits of
metaphysical poetry by the poet
making it a jolting as well as well as
an enthralling read. Donne has shed
light upon the quintessence and
unparalleled beauty of the true love
which he and his beloved share by
taking help from his metaphysical wit
in this poem which speaks volumes
about his credibility as a metaphysical
poet.
- His pre-love days where he
was deprived of true beauty
has been compared to
slumber in “The seven
sleeper’s den”. In these conceits
two very heterogeneous
entities have been violently
fused in a single matrix, the
unlikeness of which strikes us
more than its justness, which
is exactly what metaphysical
poetry stands for. These
conceits which are far-fetched
and hyperbolic are also
responsible for providing Good
Morrow with a certain level of
obscurity and novelty of
thought which is what the
metaphysical poets strived to
attain in their poetry.
- he uses hyperbole to contrast their
states before and after their
discovery of love, but the
exaggeration is earthy and entirely
outside the usual courtly love
vocabulary, having here something
even of a comic effect. The terms
'wean'd', 'suck'd', 'country pleasures',
and 'childishly' all suggest that in
this new love they have suddenly
come to maturity in their
knowledge and experience.
- it is worth mentioning that
through false pleasures the poet
might be indicating towards his
various liaisons with other
women which were just a
reflection of the beauty which
his true lover filled him with.
- This connection between soul and body
established in Good Morrow awards
immorality to the love which the poet and
his beloved share. Death can only destroy
their physical togetherness but their
connected souls will counter and surmount
the effects of death making it eternal.
- And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch
not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights
controls, And makes one little room, an everywhere. Let sea
discoveries to new worlds have gone, Let maps to others,
worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess our world;
each hath one and is one.
- The metaphysical conceits present in ‘The Good Morrow’ in
plenty which fuse binaries into singular essences, exemplify this
particular trait. Donne has compared the transfiguring effect of
love and its macrocosmic spread with the discoveries of Drake,
Magellan and Columbus.
- ‘The Good Morrow’ because
of its sharp anti-Petrarchan
conceits, vibrant yet
seemingly odd images and
the heterogeneous
assimilation of ideas and
allusion, is a great piece of
Metaphysical poetry where
a perfect marriage takes
place between the soul and
the body, emotionality and
intellectuality, the physical
and the psychological and
the sublime and the
scholastic. This poem
because of its imagery,
conceits and subtle lyrical
quality entails the “more
intellectual less verbal
character” of Donne’s wit.
- The complete love defined in Good Morrow brings about unparalleled
bliss in the lives of the lovers. It has the power to provide the lovers
with a totality of experience which blinds them to everything
around them as they are completely encapsulated in their “little
room” which is an “everywhere”. This love can only be achieved when
the body and the soul of the lovers have been orchestrated in a
single unit. Such love has been awarded the quintessence of the
fifth element by Donne. Micro // Macro
- A major trait of metaphysical poetry is to break away
from the Petrarchan traditions of poetry making. ‘The
Good Morrow’ is very different from the 16th century
Elizabethan love poems in the way it treats love and
the mistress. The love lyrics of his predecessors speak
more of the pursuit of love and the angst caused by
it as opposed to the fulfillment of heart’s desires and
portrays the beloved as someone angelic and hence
unattainable. On the contrary Donne has described his
beloved as one made of flesh and blood with whom
he has enjoyed satisfying moments of love.
- Good Morrow is a celebrated piece of love poetry
because it preached the concept that true love is
the state when passion elevates itself to the level
of divine experiences. It showed that body and soul
are two faces of the same coin and they need to
function as a “unified sensibility” as quoted by T.S.
Eliot. Indeed it’s wonderful how Eliot concluded the
poem The Good Morrow, simply the best among
metaphysical poems.