The Good-Morrow

BY  J O H N DONNE

I wonder, by my troth, 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.

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-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we 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 none do slacken, none can die.

Stanza One 
I wonder, by my troth, 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. 
In the first stanza of this piece the speaker begins with three questions. They all
inquire into the state of his and his lover’s lives before they were known to one
another. He wonders allowed, addressing his lover, what “by my troth” (or what in the
world) they did before they loved. This question and those which follow are
rhetorical. He does not expect a real answer. 
In the next line he asks if they were “not weaned till then.” He does not believe the
two were truly adults, separated from their mother’s milk, until they met. Their lives
did not begin until they gave up “country pleasures.” They became more
sophisticated and less dependent on childish pleasures. 
In the fourth line he asks if they were sleeping like the “Seven Sleepers.” This is a
reference to a story regarding seven children buried alive by a Roman emperor.
Rather than dying, they slept through their long entombment to be found almost 200
years later. It is like the speaker has his lover were in stasis until they could be
unearthed at the proper time and brought together. 
The final three lines of the stanza answer his previous questions. He says, yes, of
cours, everything he said is the truth. Anything he experienced before getting with
this current lover was not real. It was only a fancy. 
 

Stanza Two 
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-discoverers to new worlds have gone, 
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, 
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. 
The second stanza is structured in a similar way in which the first four lines
introduce a reader to another aspect of the relationship. He describes how now, in
their “good-morrow’ they will live in happiness together. There will be no need to
“watch…one anther out of fear.” Their relationship is perfect. 
In the following lines the speaker is proving that any temptation outside is worthless.
His eyes are controlled by love, therefore everything he sees is transformed by his
adoration. He speaks of a small room that contains everything on earth. There is no
reason for him to leave the bedroom he shares with his lover.

The next three lines make use of anaphora with the repetition of the starting word
“Let.” The speaker is telling his lover that now that he has this relationship the rest of
the world means nothing. The explorers can go out and claim anything and
everything they want to. He will be happy to “possess one world” in which they have
one another.
 

Stanza Three 
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, 
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; 
Where can we 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 none do slacken, none can die.
The final stanza begins with the speaker looking into his lover’s eyes. There he can
see his own face and he knows her face appears in his eyes as well. Their heartfelt
connection is evident within their faces. 
The next lines continue to refer to their bodies/ Donne makes use of conceit, one of
the techniques for which he is best known. In this case he is comparing their faces
to two hemispheres. Unlike the hemispheres of the actual world, their facial
hemispheres are perfect. There are no “two better” in the universe. There is no “sharp
north” or “declining west.” Donne’s speaker sees himself and his lover as soulmates,
they are the other’s missing half. 
The last three lines speak on how a lack of balance can cause death. This is likely a
reference to the mediev

 The Good-Morrow” Summary

o What did you and I even do before we were in love? Were we still
breastfeeding? Did we only enjoy simple, childish things? Or were we fast
asleep with the Seven Sleepers? It’s true. But all of this is just pleasure’s
dream. If I ever wanted and gained something beautiful, it was just a dream of
you.

And now good morning to our souls, which are waking up. They do not watch
each other out of fear. There’s no need for jealousy; love makes it so that we
don’t need to look at anything except each other. And it makes one small
room as wide as the world. Let explorers cross the ocean to discover new
worlds. Let other people make maps, charting worlds upon worlds. Let us
have just one world: each of us is a world, and so each of us has a world.
 My face appears in your eye and your face appears in my eye. And the truth
of our hearts is visible in our faces. Where can we find two better globes,
without the cold of the north or the darkness that comes when the sun sets in
the west? When something dies, it dies because its parts were not
appropriately mixed. But our loves are so perfectly matched that we have
become one, and thus our love will not lose its power, and we will not die.

 “The Good-Morrow” Themes

Love as an Awakening

“The Good Morrow” is a celebration of love, which it presents as an intense

and unparalleled pleasure. All the joys that the two lovers experienced before
they found each other pale in comparison to the joy they experience together.
Indeed, love is so powerful that the speaker describes it as an awakening of
the soul: it is almost a religious experience. And like a religious experience, it
reshapes the lovers’ attitude to the world at large. Like monks or nuns who
dedicate themselves to religious practice, the two lovers dedicate themselves
to love above adventure and career success. “The Good Morrow” thus
translates romantic—and erotic—love into a religious, even holy, experience.
Love itself, the speaker suggests, is capable of producing the same insights
as religion.

“The Good Morrow” separates the lives of the lovers into two parts: before
they found each other, and after. The speaker describes the first part of their
lives with disdain: the pleasures they enjoyed were “childish.” Indeed, they
were not even “weaned”: they were like babies. Like children, they had a
limited understanding of life. They were aware of only some of its “country” (or
lowly) pleasures, going through the motions of life without knowing there could
be something more.
But once they find each other, it feels as though their eyes have been opened.
The speaker realizes that any “beauty” experienced before this love was really
nothing more than a “dream”—a pale imitation—of the joy and pleasure the
speaker has now. “Good-morrow to our waking souls,” the speaker
announces at the start of stanza 2, as though the lovers had been asleep and
are just now glimpsing the light of day for the first time.

Since the sun is often associated with Jesus Christ in Christian religious
traditions and light is often associated with enlightenment, the speaker’s
description of this experience is implicitly cast in religious terms. That is, the
speaker makes waking up alongside a lover sound like a religious epiphany or
a conversion experience. The consequences of this epiphany are also
implicitly religious. Having tasted the intense pleasures of love, the lovers give
up on adventure and exploration: instead they treat their “one little room” as
“an everywhere.” In this way, they become like monks or nuns: people who
separate themselves from the world to dedicate themselves to their faith.

Further, the lovers' devotion to each other wins them immortality: “none can
die,” the speaker announces in the poem’s final line. Immortality is more
commonly taken to be the reward for dedicated religious faith, not earthly
pleasures like romantic love. In describing this relationship in religious terms,
the speaker breaks down the traditional distinctions between love and religion.
Where many religious traditions treat erotic love as something potentially
harmful to religious devotion, the speaker of “The Good Morrow” suggests
that erotic love leads to the same devotion, insight, and immortality that
religion promises.

However, the speaker doesn’t specify the nature of the love in question. If the
lovers are married, for instance, the reader doesn’t hear anything about it.
Instead, the speaker focuses on the perfection of their love, noting the way
the two lovers complement each other. Unlike other poems that argue for the
 holiness of married love specifically (like Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and
Loving Husband”), “The Good Morrow” holds out an even more subversive
possibility: that all love is capable of producing religious epiphany, whether or
not it takes a form that the Church sanctions, like marriage.

Exploration and Adventure

“The Good Morrow” was written during the Age of Discovery, the period of
intense European sea exploration lasting roughly from the 15th to 17th
centuries. This context informs the poem's second and third stanzas, with
their focus on "sea-discoverers," "new worlds," "maps," and "hemispheres."
The poem compares the desire to chart new lands with the pleasures of love
itself, and finds the latter to be more powerful and exciting. Indeed, the
speaker finds love so pleasurable that he or she proposes to withdraw from
the world in order to dedicate him or herself entirely to that love. Instead of
seeking adventure, the speaker proposes that the lovers “make one little room
an everywhere.” For the speaker, then, love creates its own world to explore.

Note how, in the poem’s second stanza, the speaker proposes that the lovers
renounce their worldly ambitions. The speaker says that instead of crossing
the oceans or mapping foreign countries, they should stay in bed and gaze
into each other's eyes. Indeed, the speaker argues in stanza 3, they will not
find better "hemispheres" out in the world than each others' eyes. This means
that, for the speaker, giving up the outside world is not a sacrifice. Indeed, the
speaker finds a better world in bed with this lover.

Importantly, however, this "lovers' world" is not totally separate from the wider
world. Instead, it recreates it in miniature, essentially resulting in
a microcosm that reproduces the entire world itself within the lovers'
relationship. The poem thus argues that true love can be a way of
 experiencing the entirety of existence. Essentially, there's no need to, say,
seek adventure on the high seas, because everything is already contained
within the experience of love itself.

 Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Good-Morrow”

o Lines 1-4

The first four lines of “The Good-Morrow” establish the poem’s broad
concerns and hint at its unusual form. The speaker begins by asking a series
of questions, directed at his or her lover. The speaker wants to know what the
two lovers did before they fell in love. These questions are rhetorical in that
the speaker isn’t actually interested in the lover’s response. In fact, the
speaker has already made up his or her mind. Before they met each other,
their pleasures were “childish.” The speaker characterizes these early,
childish pleasures in a variety of ways: they were like babies, still nursing (and
therefore “not weaned”). Or they were only interested in unsophisticated
“country pleasures”—potentially an obscene pun on a word for women's
genitalia . Finally, the speaker alludes to an important tradition in Christianity
and Islam: the myth of the seven sleepers, a group of young people who hid
in a cave for 300 years to escape religious persecution. The speaker and the
lover were thus like pious Christians; now that they've woken up, they are
rewarded for their piety with a new life. This allusion sets up the poem's core
argument that erotic love can have effects that are just as profound as the
effects of religious practice.

Because the poem encourages the reader to imagine that the speaker is
directly addressing his or her lover, the poem takes on the qualities
of apostrophe in these lines: speaker talks to the lover, but the lover is
unable to respond to the speaker or contest the speaker's account of their
relationship. This establishes a pattern that will continue throughout of the
speaker monopolizing the poem's descriptions of love.
 These lines look like a fairly standard stanza of English poetry: they are
in iambic pentameter and rhymed in a criss-cross pattern, ABAB. This is a
widely used stanza form in English, but there are some details that are slightly
askew. For instance, the speaker uses a slant rhyme in lines 1 and 3, “I” and
“childishly.” As the poem progresses, there will be several such instances of
formal sloppiness, such as loose meter and imperfect rhymes. The speaker’s
attention is evidently focused elsewhere. Indeed, the speaker seems to pay
closer attention to sound inside the lines. The first two lines of the poem
contain an almost overwhelming quantity of alliteration, assonance,
and consonance, on /w/, /l/, /o/, and /ee/ sounds. The speaker’s enthusiasm
and joy come through in the poem’s play of sound.

If this play of sound seems exuberant, even out of control, the speaker
asserts control in other, subtler ways. Though the first line of the poem
is enjambed, the next three are end-stopped, establishing a pattern that will
persist through the poem. Overall, the poem is mostly end-stopped. The
speaker is exuberant, but he or she is nonetheless able to carefully calibrate
his or her thoughts to the length of the poem's lines.

o Lines 5-7