Non-African Poetry: The Good Morrow by John Donne – SS2 Literature-in-English Lesson Note (Third Term)

The Good-Morrow is a love poem by John Donne in three stanzas. The speaker asks what he and his lover did before they fell in love and decides that their earlier life was like childhood or sleep. He then says their love makes a complete world of its own, balanced, warm and unable to die.

Behavioural objectives

By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:

• explain the meaning of the title and of old words such as “thou” and “by my troth”;
• describe what the speaker says about life before the lovers met;
• explain the allusion to the Seven Sleepers;
• show how Donne links the lovers’ world to the exploration of new worlds;
• explain the images of the hemispheres, the North and the West in stanza 3;
• state what the poem says about why the lovers’ love cannot die.

What happens in stanza 1 of The Good-Morrow?

The title and the first line

“Good Morrow” is archaic, an old-fashioned way of greeting someone. It means good morning, so the reader has a clue that the scene is set early in the day. Donne liked to join some of his words with a hyphen.

The first line takes the reader into the mind of the first-person speaker, who is asking either himself or his lover a puzzling question. The language is 17th century English, so “thou” means you and “by my troth” means in all honesty or truth.

The first line runs on into the second (enjambment). The caesurae (pauses caused by punctuation) stop the reader from going too quickly through these words. This is a carefully phrased question.

“Did, till we loved?”

The small phrase “Did, till we loved?” is important because it gives sense to the previous line and sets the poem off properly. What kind of existence did the pair have before they fell in love?

Many lovers ask this question, because when two people become firmly settled in love, the time before they met seems to hold no value. It is as if they never lived and did nothing meaningful.

Weaned, country pleasures and the Seven Sleepers

“Were we not weaned till then?” To be weaned is to be gradually given adult food while coming off a diet of mother’s milk. The speaker is implying that they were infants before they were loved.

The third line reinforces this sense of the childish existence the two had. The “country pleasures” are either crude sensual pleasures or immature sexual pleasures, mere surface experiences.

Or they lived life asleep, as it were. The allusion is to the Seven Sleepers, Christian youths who fled from the Roman emperor Decius (who ruled from 249 to 251) and were sealed in a cave. The story says they slept for nearly two hundred years and woke up in a world where Christianity had taken hold.

The implication is that these two lived as if asleep until they fell in love and woke up. Their love became a kind of new religion for them.

The structure of the stanza

The first four lines, with alternate rhymes, form a quatrain. The last three lines consolidate the meaning and share the same end rhyme. The final line is a hexameter, a longer line.

The closing lines

In “‘Twas so; …” the speaker confirms that, before they were lovers, any pleasures were not real. It was as if they were infants asleep, not really awake but merely dreaming.

Donne goes on to say that his desires were fulfilled and that he got what he wanted out of beauty. Even that was not real. It was only a dream.

What happens in stanza 2 of The Good-Morrow?

In the first stanza the speaker concluded that the lovers had not been alive, or had done nothing, until they fell in love and became aware. Now he wishes both of them a good morning as they wake.

There is no fear in their relationship. They are devoted and completely in love, which is the be-all and end-all. They see the world through their love.

In “And makes one little room everywhere”, the room the lovers are in is small, a microcosm. Because their love is universal, it goes everywhere they go and is whole, a macrocosm. This line reflects the Renaissance idea that an individual held the universe within them.

The last three lines of the stanza refer to the voyages to new worlds. Donne’s use of metaphor was new for his time. Explorers were finding new lands with the latest maps, and astronomers were beginning to chart the stars seriously.

The known world was expanding rapidly, and Donne connects this fact with the world the lovers have created.

In “Let us possess one world” (some versions have “our world”), the speaker says that each of them has a world of their own, but together they possess one new world, their love world. They own it, and they are free to travel through it.

What happens in stanza 3 of The Good-Morrow?

Reflections and the two hemispheres

In the third stanza, the speaker moves close to his lover.

Donne’s fascination with reflections and imagery comes to the fore. As the lovers gaze into each other’s eyes, they see each other reflected. This is evidence of more bonding, of two becoming one.

The lovers are true and plain. They do not have to pretend, show off or be fancy in front of one another.

The speaker returns to questioning, as in the first stanza, and asks “Where can we find two better hemispheres” (halves of a globe), which could be their eyes and faces?

The North and the West

“Without sharp North, without declining West”: the cold North suggests a cold relationship. The sun sets in the West, which suggests the end of the day, or the end of a relationship.

In these four lines the speaker reinforces the idea that the lovers are a single entity. Their relationship is warm and rising, with no coldness and no end in sight.

Why their love cannot die

“Whatever dies was not mixed equally”: in the medical theory of the time, death was thought to be the result of imbalances in the body’s elements.

In “If our two loves …”, the speaker suggests that their two loves are not at all imbalanced. Their loves are so alike that they can never die.

This is an idealistic end to the poem, but Donne’s original view of love remains with us today, for example in popular song lyrics.

Evaluation

1. What does the title “Good Morrow” mean, and what does it tell the reader about the setting?
2. Explain the meaning of “weaned” and “country pleasures” in stanza 1.
3. Who were the Seven Sleepers, and why does Donne refer to them?
4. How does Donne connect the lovers’ world to the exploration of new worlds in stanza 2?
5. What do the North and the West stand for in stanza 3?

Assignment

In one paragraph, explain how stanza 3 of The Good-Morrow shows that the lovers’ relationship is warm and cannot die.