The Good-Morrow

by John Donne

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Analysis

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“The Good-Morrow,” written by English metaphysical poet John Donne, was first published in Donne’s collection Songs and Sonnets in 1663. Although it is often classified as a sonnet, the poem breaks with the sonnet’s usual structure; it consists of three stanzas of seven lines each, for a total of twenty-one lines rather than the sonnet’s traditional fourteen. For Donne, the term “sonnet” simply referred to a love poem.

In “The Good-Morrow,” Donne uses a metaphor to compare the speaker and his lover to explorers. However, they do not explore the natural world around them; instead, they explore one another, it seems, both emotionally and sexually. The speaker says in the second stanza,

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.

Thus, the speaker feels no need to go sailing for adventure or to discover new worlds to put on the map for others to follow. Instead, he only wants to explore one world—the world of his beloved—and to be explored by her. In the first stanza, he rather explicitly addresses the sexual encounters he has had prior to meeting his beloved, describing the “beauty” to which he was attracted then, and which he claims that he “got,” but which he realizes now only to be a poor shadow of the beauty he would later find in his beloved. The first stanza also contains an allusion to the medieval legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, in the line “Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?” With this reference, the speaker questions whether he and his lover were merely asleep and dreaming before they met, and he concludes that it was so. He recognizes the difference between that childish dream of lust and his current love, indicating that he is aware now of his multifaceted attraction to his lover: it is not merely sexual, though that is part of it. She is his to explore in every way, just as he is hers.

The speaker continues this theme of exploration into the third stanza as well when he compares himself and his lover to “two . . . hemispheres” that make up one world via another, related, metaphor. They are now twin halves of the same globe, having come together to become well and truly one: they are incomplete without the other and unite to form “one world,” as he said in the second stanza. They are equals, then: equals in exploration of one another’s emotions, intellects, bodies, and spirits, and equals in terms of the space they share in the relationship. In this way, they are “so alike” that neither would want to separate from this world, were it even possible for them to do so. Their commitment to and exploration of one another will prevent their love from ever perishing:

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

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