Good Morning John Donne – Critical Summary

The poem “The Good Morrow” is among the best of the metaphysical love poetry produced by John Donne. The poem begins with a question to the two lovers, the poet and his beloved; He asks “What did you and I do until we loved?” The question is significant and needs no answer because it clearly indicates that life before falling in love was nothing more than “country pleasures” like that of a child sucking on its mother’s breast to survive. The child sucking on the mother’s breast never realizes the world around him.

The poet continues to compare himself and his beloved with the use of a presumptuous and far-fetched metaphor from “The Lair of the Seven Sleepers” to express that his entire life was nothing more than an unconscious life. If they had enjoyed some kind of pleasures and experienced joys, they were just imagination. The poet opens his heart in the praise of his beloved as:

“If I ever saw any beauty;

What I wanted and got was nothing more than a dream of yours. “

The poet says good morning to the “awakened souls” of him and his beloved because their past life, before they met, was all shadow and darkness of sleep. It is now, after meeting his beloved, that the poet feels his soul awake. The poet believes that a little love can turn even a small room into a whole world.

The poet wants to ignore the world around him because he wants to focus only on his beloved. Therefore, the discoverers of the sea can discover new worlds, spread maps, but the poet must “own a world” of the unity of the union of lovers. Donne creates a beautiful equation here, that is, a lover equals loved and the beloved equals lover. In other words, Donne’s math would show the result of:

1 lover + 1 lover = 1 love

Gold

1 + 1 = 1

This is the equation that leads to the fusion of the lovers’ being in unity:

“My face in your eyes, yours in mine appears.”

The poet even declares the two lovers as “two better hemispheres.”

John Donne has convinced us of the magical charms of love and the actions of lovers who have the power to transform normal beings and casual acts into perennial stories; here the story is of a lover and beloved who has formed the unity of being through pure love that is beyond the physical.

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