John Donne: Poems Summary and Analysis

of "The Sunne Rising"

The poet asks the sun why it is shining in and disturbing him and his lover in bed. The sun
should go away and do other things rather than disturb them, like wake up ants or rush late
schoolboys to start their day. Lovers should be permitted to make their own time as they see fit.
After all, sunbeams are nothing compared to the power of love, and everything the sun might see
around the world pales in comparison to the beloved’s beauty, which encompasses it all. The
bedroom is the whole world.

Analysis

“The Sunne Rising” is a 30-line poem in three stanzas, written with the poet/lover as the speaker.
The meter is irregular, ranging from two to six stresses per line in no fixed pattern. The longest
lines are generally at the end of the three stanzas, but Donne’s focus here is not on perfect
regularity. The rhyme, however, never varies, each stanza running abbacdcdee. The poet’s tone is
mocking and railing as it addresses the sun, covering an undercurrent of desperate, perhaps even
obsessive love and grandiose ideas of what his lover is.

The poet personifies the sun as a “busy old fool” (line 1). He asks why it is shining in and
disturbing “us” (4), who appear to be two lovers in bed. The sun is peeking through the curtains
of the window of their bedroom, signaling the morning and the end of their time together. The
speaker is annoyed, wishing that the day has not yet come (compare Juliet’s assurances that it is
certainly not the morning, in Romeo and Juliet III.v). The poet then suggests that the sun go off
and do other things rather than disturb them, such as going to tell the court huntsman that it is a
day for the king to hunt, or to wake up ants, or to rush late schoolboys and apprentices to their
duties. The poet wants to know why it is that “to thy motions lovers’ seasons run” (4). He
imagines a world, or desires one, where the embraces of lovers are not relegated only to the
night, but that lovers can make their own time as they see fit.

In the second stanza the poet continues to mock the sun, saying that its “beams so reverend and
strong” are nothing compared to the power and glory of their love. He boasts that he “could
eclipse and cloud them [the sunbeams] with a wink.” In a way this is true; he can cut out the sun
from his view by closing his eyes. Yet, the lover doesn’t want to “lose her sight so long” as a
wink would take. The poet is emphasizing that the sun has no real power over what he and his
lover do, while he is the one who chooses to allow the sun in because by it he can see his lover’s
beauty.

The lover then moves on to loftier claims. “If her eyes have not blinded thine” (13) implies that
his beloved’s eyes are more brilliant than sunlight. This was a standard Renaissance love-poem
convention (compare Shakespeare “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” in Sonnet 130) to
proclaim his beloved’s loveliness. Indeed, the sun should “tell me/Whether both th’Indias of
spice and mine/Be where thou lef’st them, or lie here with me.” Here, Donne lists wondrous and
exotic places (the Indias are the West and East Indies, well known in Donne’s time for their
spices and precious metals) and says that his mistress is all of those things: “All here in one bed
lay” (20). “She’s all states, and all princes I”(21). That is, all the beautiful and sovereign things in
the world, which the sun meets as it travels the world each day, are combined in his mistress.

This is a monstrous, bold comparison, a hyperbole of the highest order. As usual, such an
extreme comparison leads us to see a spiritual metaphor in the poem. As strong as the sun’s light
is, it pales in comparison to the spiritual light that shines from the divine and which brings man
to love the divine.

The strange process of reducing the entire world to the bed of the lovers reaches its zenith in the
last stanza: “In that the world’s contracted thus” (26). Indeed, the sun need not leave the room;
by shining on them “thou art everywhere” (29). The final line contains a play on the Ptolemaic
astronomical idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun rotating around the
Earth: “This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.” Here Donne again gives ultimate
universal importance to the lovers, making all the physical world around them subject to them.

This poem gives voice to the feeling of lovers that they are outside of time and that their
emotions are the most important things in the world. There is something of the adolescent
melodrama of first love here, which again suggests that Donne is exercising his intelligence and
subtlety to make a different kind of point. While the love between himself and his lover may
seem divine, metaphorically it can be true that divine love is more important than the things of
this world.

The conflation of the earth into the body of his beloved is a little more difficult to understand.
Donne would not be the first man who likened his female lover to a field to be sown by him, or a
country to be ruled by him. Yet, if she represents the world because God loves the world, is
Donne really putting himself, as the one who loves, in the position of God?

What we can say with some firmness is that the sun, which marks the passage of earthly time, is
rejected as an authority. The “seasons” of lovers (with the pun on the seasons of the earth, also
ruled by the sun) should not be ruled by the movements of the sun. There should be nothing
above the whims and desires of lovers, as they feel, and on the spiritual level the sun is just one
more creation of God; all time and physical laws are subject to God.

That the sun, of course, will not heed a man’s insults and orders is tacitly acknowledged. It will
continue on its way each day, and one cannot wink it out of existence. There is nothing that the
poet can do to change the movements of the sun or the coming of the day, no matter how clever
his comparisons. From his perspective, the whole world is right there with him, yet he knows
that his perspective is limited. This conceit of railing against the sun and denying the reality of
the world outside the bedroom closes the poem with a more heartfelt (and more believable)
assertion that the “bed thy center is.” It can be imagined that here he is speaking more to himself,
realizing that the time he has with his lover is more important to him than anything else in his
life in this moment, even while the spiritual meaning of the poem extends to the sun’s relatively
weak power compared with the cosmic forces of the divine.
John Donne: Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for John Donne: Poems is a great resource to ask questions,
find answers, and discuss the novel.

A valediction forbidding mourning

The final three stanzas use an extended metaphor in which Donne compares the two individuals
in the marriage to the two legs of a compass: though they each have their own purpose, they are
inextricably linked at the joint or pivot at the top—that...

Asked by Aya K #575784

Answered by Aslan 4 days ago 11/12/2016 11:23 PM View All Answers

Death

Death is a common image in Donne's poetry. Rather than a sad ending, Donne looked at death as
a moment of change: a time of transition. Consider his poem "A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning. “In this poem Donne describes leaving his wife as a form...

Asked by Wu T #571080
Answered by Aslan 15 days ago 11/1/2016 4:12 PM View All Answers

Meaning of each of these sentences in John Donnes poem "The First Anniversary"

I'm sorry, this is a short-answer forum. You'll need to ask your questions separately.

As for the first quote, Donne is essentially saying that for every new philosophy we accept, prior
beliefs must be questioned.

Asked by Jamil A #549959

Answered by jill d #170087 2 months ago 9/2/2016 6:53 PM View All Answers

The final three stanzas use an extended metaphor in which Donne compares the two individuals in the
marriage to the two legs of a compass: though they each have their own purpose, they are inextricably
linked at the joint or pivot at the top—that is, in their spiritual unity in God. Down on the paper—the
earthly realm—one leg stays firm, just as Donne’s wife will remain steadfast in her love at home.
Meanwhile the other leg describes a perfect circle around this unmoving center, so long as the center leg
stays firmly grounded and does not stray. She will always lean in his direction, just like the center leg of
the compass. So long as she does not stray, “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end
where I begun,” back at home (lines 35-36). They are a team, and so long as she is true to him, he will be
able to return to exactly the point where they left off before his journey.

“The Good-Morrow” is a poem of twenty-one lines divided into three stanzas. The poet
addresses the woman he loves as they awaken after having spent the night together.

The poem begins with a direct question from the poet to the woman. Deliberately exaggerating,
the poet expresses his conviction that their lives only began when they fell in love. Before, they
were mere babies at their mothers’ breasts or were indulging in childish “country pleasures.”
This phrase had a double edge in John Donne’s time: it would have been understood as a
reference to gross sexual gratification. Perhaps, the poet continues, they were asleep in the Seven
Sleepers’ den (referring to an ancient Syrian legend in which persecuted Christians slept for
several hundred years in a cave near Ephesus). He asserts that compared with their true love
(“this”), all past pleasures have been merely “fancies,” and the women he “desir’d, and got”
were only a “dream” of this one woman.

The second stanza opens with a triumphant greeting to their souls as they awaken into a constant,
trusting love. They have no need to keep a jealous eye on each other because their love subdues
the desire to look for other partners; it is so complete, so self-sufficient, that it “makes one little
room, an everywhere.”

The emphasis moves to the external world that the lovers have abandoned for each other. The
poet contrasts the physical worlds sought by...

Transcript of the
The Good

-
Morrow
Lecture.
Welcome. I am Dr Andrew Barker and this is the Mycroft Lecture on John Donne’s
The Good Morrow
.
The Good Morrow
is an aubade. This is a poem written in the morning, a
song of the morning. The poet is addressing a young lady that he has just spent the night
with, and whatever has transpired the night before has either been some sensational sexual
activity, or one of
those life -
changing, emotional experiences. Something has occurred
between them that has changed the balance of their relationship and in the morning, John
Donne addresses her with these words.
As a brief synopsis of his poetical background, Donne is one of the metaphysical
poets. The metaphysical poets, another one being Andrew Marvell, whose work you may
come across. The metaphysical poets were a loosely connected group of writers from the
17th
century, so we are post
-
Shakespeare at the time when this poem is written, and the
concerns of the metaphysical poets would be
-
if I was to say, “Metaphysical poets tend to
investigate the world through witty yet rational discussions of its phenomena, ra
ther than by
intuition or mysticism”: that pretty much sums up what the metaphysical poets were trying to
do. Wittily assess the phenomena of the modern world, not through a mystical way of
looking at it, but that this is what is actually going on in the w
orld as we experience and see
it. The brilliant critic Dr. Johnson wasn't overly flattering about the metaphysical poets. He
was to say of them, and I'll read this out to you: "The metaphysical poets were men of
learning, and, to show their learning was th
eir whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to
show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and, very often, such
verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so
imperfect, that they were
only found to be verses by counting the syllables. The most
heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for
illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises;
but the read
er commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes
admires, is seldom pleased."
Well, perhaps Johnson has a point here, but of this quite famous synopsis of what the
metaphysical poets do, we can ask whether it applies to the specif
ic poem that we are looking
at here,
The Good Morrow
. Now, the way I will introduce
The Good Morrow
to you, I will
read it through. I will then do the sentence
-
by
-
sentence paraphrasing of what Donne is saying
in the poem.
I will then leave one of the line
s of the poem out. For teachers who may wish to
introduce this to a class, there's a certain crassness to it which you might not feel happy about
introducing to younger students. So I'll leave that to the end, and you can cut that piece out if
you so choos
e. But since it is there in the poem, it would be remiss of me not to mention that
section. What I'm going to point out to you is actually there in Donne's intent.
And finally, I will give a synopsis of Donne's overall idea of what has happened
between las
t night and the way he sees himself as he looks at the girl in the morning, sayin
this beautiful poem to her.
So this is the first read
-
through of John Donne's
The Good
-
Morrow
.
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not wean
ed till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
5
you plight your troth to show your honesty. So he's saying, 'I want to lay my cards on the
table here. I'm really interested in knowin
g what you and I were doing until we fell in love.'
Now, the implication is that something has happened and that that something has
recently changed their relationship to change the nature of their love.
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we
loved?
Were we not weaned till then
?
he asks.
'Weaned' is what you do to a baby when it is being breast
-
fed and you want to feed
the baby cow milk. So to move the baby from breast milk to cow milk, you wean the baby
off the mother's breast. And Donne i
s using it specifically as a metaphor for ageing. For
going from childishness into adulthood. Now of course it's not a perfect metaphor because
you don't wean a child into it becoming an adult, you wean a baby into it becoming a child.
But we can understan
d what he's getting at here. He wants to show that previous to this
experience that they have had, they were children
-
unsophisticated, babyish, and now
something has happened which has changed them into being older.
Wer
e we not weaned till then
?
he
asks.
But suck'd on country pleasures childishly
?
So whatever the pleasures they have had before this new experience has befallen
them, they were children, they
weren't weaned. They hadn't yet loved. I'll come back to that
line, incidentally. But 'sucked on country pleasures childishly'. 'Sucked' is still alluding to
breast
-
feeding, I think. We
sucked on country pleasures childishly
.
Or snorted we in the Seven S
leepers' den
?
'The Seven Sleepers' den' could be one of the examples of this gratuitous learning that
Dr. Johnson seems to dislike so much, so heaven knows what he would have made of T.S.
Elliot and Ezra Pound. The Seven Sleepers' den is a Catholic story
whereby there are a group
of children who are undergoing some persecution and they hide in the Seven Sleepers' den
and then hundreds of years later, they awaken to a new world. The use of this story to Donne
6
here is that they are children, the Seven Sleep
ers are children when they are in the den, in the
Seven Sleepers' den. And when they awake, when they come out of the den, they awake to a
new world. And that's what he's looking at here. He and the girl are, he sees, children, or like
children. And someth
ing has happened to make them awake to a new world.
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den
, he says, as well. 'Snorted' has the
connotation of animals. I always think of pigs when I think of 'snorted'. And Seven Sleepers
den
-
a den is a place where a f
ox or an animal lives. It's as if Donne is saying ‘Prior to this
moment, we were childish animals. But something has happened to change that.' And he's
asked these questions. So I'll read it through again up to this point. And the questions he's
asked are:
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did till we loved?
Were we not weaned till then?
But suck'd on country pleasures childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?
Four questions, he asks. And then he says, 'twas so'. Meaning he's asked the
four questions,
and he's answered, 'Yes', we were kids, we were children, we were animalistic children. This
is true. ''Twas so.'
It was so. He's asked the question and answered it.
But
this, all pleasures fancies be
, he tells her.
But this, all pleasure
s fancies be.
What
he means by this is that all of the previous pleasures that he has had, they have merely been
fancies. 'Fancies' being night, small, but basically insignificant instances. Not something you
don't enjoy, but something that doesn't really
carry any weight. He says, 'Yes, we did do this,
but all the pleasure we got from it was mere fancy'.
'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.
What he means here, an
d this is a slightly complicated line, with a lot built into it, but not too
difficult for us, I think.
If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired, and got,'twas but a dream of thee.
7
He is saying, 'All the beauty that I have seen up to this point
-
'
Let's be specific here. There are two ways of reading this line, and I'll show you them
both.
The first is,
If ever any beauty I did see
-
and by beauty here, he means
-
'anything
beautiful that I've ever observed up to this point in my life (like a sunse
t), all the beauty that
I've seen up to this point in my life
'twas but a dream of thee.
Everything beautiful I've seen
was a preparation for the beauty that I see in you now. I was looking at other beauties, and I
was dreaming of the beauty that I was go
ing to see when I look at you.' He was in a sort of
pre
-
cognitive state. So 'beauty' here is world beauties. Anything beautiful.
But the other way of looking at it, and the other way I think is more fun and more
realistic, though not specifically more
romantic perhaps, is that he is basically saying, 'Any
beauty that I did see, which I desired and got, so any beautiful woman that I've seen up to this
point in my life, that I fancied, that I desired and got, I seduced and had sex with, really, all
the ot
her women that I've known up to this point in my life were but a dream of you. They
were insignificant compared to you because there is something about you that is so special
that I was looking for it, dreaming of it in every other woman I've ever met.'
It
's a lovely sentiment, I'm sure.
Whether a woman would actually buy that if she heard it is a different matter
altogether. 'Every single other beautiful woman I've ever seduced in my life, every woman
I've ever slept with, really, I was just dreaming of y
ou, as I looked at them, because you are
so perfect that I was searching for that beauty that you possess when I was with them.'
I think the other reference we have to bring into this here is Plato's allegory of 'the
cave'. And Plato's cave allegory is th
at human beings are on the floor of the cave and they
cannot see the sun above them, because they can only see a wall of the cave, and they see the
sun reflected onto the wall of the cave, and they can see reflections of things that stand before
the sun, b
ut not the things themselves. So, the idea is you never see anything perfect. You
can merely see reflections of the perfect bodies that are actually there in the light of the sun.
And what Donne seems to be
-
and I'm fairly certain is
-
alluding to here is
that he's seeing
the girl as one of the perfect bodies as allegorized by Plato and the cave. And every other girl
that he's ever met is merely the reflection of her on the cave wall. Whether the young lady is
flattered by this display of his learning and
eloquence remains to be seen. But that's one of
the things he's alluding to, and perhaps one of the things that Johnson himself finds a rather
8
gratuitous display of learning.
So that's the first stanza for us, and I'll read that through one more time, be
cause the
second stanza is going to start with a change.
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, a
ll pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
Why I think, incidentally, that this has to be about a woman, other women, is because
you can't really
get
a sunset. When he says 'other beauties I did see which I desired and got',
it has to be a type of beauty that you can want and get. And a woman fits that bill perfectly as
far as the rhetoric of this poem goes.
So we'll now start the second stanza, which
begins with:
An
d now good morrow to our waking souls
'Good morrow', of course, means, 'good morning'. It also means 'the good morning',
this morning which we have arisen in is good. But essentially, it means good morning. 'And
now, good morning to our
waking souls.'
So the idea here is that our souls are awake on this
day. Meaning that previously, our souls were asleep. 'And now, good morning to this new
dimension in our relationship.'
I'm not a big fan of poets using the word 'souls' because I think t
he word can be used
very loosely, and almost very cheaply to just try and signify that something more significant
has happened. A change has happened which has made life more significant. Particularly if
you don't particularly believe in a soul as somethin
g that can be defined. The poem can take
on a quasi
-
religious element as soon as people start talking about the soul. However, it's easy
for us to understand what Donne is getting at here. 'Previous to whatever happened last night,
we were kids enjoying an
imalistic, childish pleasures. And now, something has happened
that has made our relationship and our love for each other more sophisticated.'
9
And now good
-
morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
Which is a rather strange line. He is saying ‘Now we don't look at each other out of
fear. So presumably, previously, they were looking at each other out of fear. And fear of
what? Fear of physical violence to each other? That seems highly unlikely. The o
nly fear that
I think fits this is the fear of betrayal, or the fear of one person leaving the other.
'Now good morrow to our waking souls, and now our souls don't look at each other
out of fear. There is now nothing for us to fear in each other'.
And Don
ne now comes up with one of those beautiful lines, one of those lines that
guys should remember to try and impress women with. It's
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
It's a beautiful idea this.
For lo
ve all love of other sights controls
.
It means that somebody in love sees with the eyes of a lover, and the eyes of a lover
see things differently from other people. I suppose the easy way, the almost clichéd way of
rephrasing this, would be
-
a lover see
s things through rose
-
tinted spectacles. Thomas
Aquinas has this lovely line where he says something like, 'What we perceive is not reality,
but reality seen through our method of reasoning.' And the method of reasoning that a lover
employs is always to se
e the world much more highlighted, much more bright, much more
interesting. As a place that he can be much more concerned with.
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
To a lover with the person he or she l
oves, the little room that they are in is
everywhere. Nothing else matters outside of that room. Ezra Pound sums this situation up in
one of his poems
The Garrett
, where he says something like:
10
I am near my desire,
nor has life in it aught better
than
this moment of clear coolness,
this moment of waking together.
The moment when you wake up next to the person you're in love with, that's as good
as life gets. And that's what has just happened to John Donne here. He looks at her, and he
looks around th
e room, and he realizes that all he wants is in that room. He doesn't need to be
anywhere else.
And remember, this is written at a time of vast discoveries. Sea voyages to discover,
stamp, file, and number different countries and cultures. But Thomas isn't concerned with
that. And this is an exciting time in Western culture. But Donne isn't concerned
with that, or
so he tells the girl. He tells the girl, 'All we need to be interested in, or all we should be
interested in, is this room, and each other'.
F
or love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
It's a bea
utiful line. Donne continues with the conceit. He says,
Let sea
-
discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown.
So, let the adventurers of our age go and discover new worlds over the seas. Let them
make maps of other
worlds on worlds. Donne doesn't mean worlds as planets here. He means
worlds -
although astronomy was around
- he means worlds as different cultures, different
countries. If he'd said 'places', it would be more specific and easier for us to understand.
'Let maps to other places on places have shown'. But that wouldn't quite work so well as for the
final line, where he says
-
and this is a rather complicated sentiment as well, but not beyond
our capabilities to understand
-
Let us possess one world, each h
ath one, and is one
.
So, although the big discoveries of our age are not being made in this room, they are
11
being made by sea
-
voyages, let us possess one world, that being the room. But I would
suggest that in
let us possess one world, each hath one, and
is one
, what he is alluding to here
is the idea that, 'you are all the world to me'. D.H. Lawrence has an idea somewhere where he
says, 'the soul of one man and one woman makes one angel'. And it's that kind of thing that
Donne is alluding to here. 'We two
are one. You are one person, I am one person, or you
have one world, I have one world, but when we are together, those two worlds become one
world.'
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
Ea
ch has a world of its own, and together, we are a world on our own. I'll read that
stanza through one more time.
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 rest of the world doesn't matter. There is just me and you.
The third stanza
begins with another one of those beautiful lines.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest
It's the first one of those lines that I think is so good.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears.
What yo
u have to imagine is two lovers looking directly into each other's eyes. And
he is seeing his face in her eyeball, and she is seeing her face in his eyeball.
12
My
face in thine eye, thine in mine appears
.
It's a beautiful line. And Donne continues with t
his by saying,
And true plain hearts do in those faces rest
.
I'd have to point out here, I don't think this line is as good.
And true plain hearts do in those faces rest
He sees his face in her eye. Or she sees her face in his eye. And he says,
And
true
plain hearts do in those faces rest.
Well, plainly he means, 'And it's obvious that we honestly
love each other'. That's the point that he's getting across. 'And true hearts'
-
good. 'Plain
hearts?' 'Plain' is a rather unfortunate word there. 'Plain'
has a connotation of ordinary. And I
don't think he means to imply that means ordinarily honest. Ordinary seems out of place, or
'plain' seems out of place in any love poem of this sort, but
t
rue plain hearts do in those faces
rest.
Also, as a metaphor, i
t's rather dodgy, isn't it? Because if you take it literally, true plain
hearts do in faces rest, they look in each other's faces, and they see their hearts in their faces.
It's a gratuitous image. It would look like something out of Salvador Dali if you t
ook it
literally. And often we have to take the metaphor literally before we look at the metaphorical
element of it. When metaphors work very well they have to work as a literal statement, and
then work as a metaphorical statement. And that one doesn't rea
lly.
And true plain hearts do
in those faces rest
. But anyway, we know exactly what he means, so there's no real problem
for us with it.
Where can we find two better hemispheres
, he continues. What he means by
where
can we find two better hemispheres
-
a
hemisphere is half a sphere. So the hemispheres he is
talking about are the hemispheres of their eyes. If you imagine a sphere being cut down the
centre, that hemisphere would be the hemisphere of the eye. Of her eyes and his eyes. And of
course, the other
hemispheres he could be talking about would be the hemispheres of the
planet, the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere. The hemispheres of the whole
planet aren't as good as what he sees in her eyes, or her eyes, because what he sees in her
eye
s is actually him. But she sees herself in his eyes as well. And this oneness connection is
showing how close they are, or how close he wants to present them as being to him. 'There's
nothing more important in the world than us two.'
I'll just point out he
re actually, I didn't do it earlier, but the line
Let us possess one
world, each hath one, and is one
. This whole 'we two are one' idea. I think it's easy to see that
as somewhat of a cliché. ‘You and I are one person.’ I would understand if someone were
to
hear that thinking, 'Well that's rather a greeting card idea'. And maybe it is, but remember
this was written 400 or 500 years ago. It's pretty difficult for us to read something from that
age when we've had 500 years more writing done by people who hav
e used those same ideas
that John Donne came up with all that time ago. Presumably when he came up with this idea,
it wasn't quite so clichéd. The critic James Wood has an interesting statement on clichés in
writing, or clichés in similes, whereby he says
the reason they become clichés, or the reason
clichés become clichés, is not because they don't work, it's because they do work. The first
person who said, 'This is as cold as snow', probably thought he was making a very accurate
and perceptive comparison.
So when Donne says, ‘We two are one, we two are one person',
this was probably considered to be a very original statement. And nonetheless, it's a nice
statement and we enjoy hearing it.
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, wit
hout declining west?
he tells us.
The point he is making here is he wants to say something derogatory, well not
derogatory, but diminishing about the world, to show why the hemispheres of the two lovers'
eyes are more important than the hemispheres of
the planet. And he hits upon the fact that the
hemispheres on the planet have a declining west. So the sun rises in the east, goes down in
the west, that's what he means by 'declining west'. He doesn't really say anything derogatory
about the hemispheres o
f the planet, but he's got to come up with something. And in 'sharp
north', presumably, he means the needle on a compass points upright towards north, and
that's a bit sharp. Perhaps that's what he means. But the sharp north and declining west are
just the
re for him to say things that enable him to make the hemispheres of the two lovers'
eyes appear more important than the hemispheres of the whole planet.
And he now gives us his final line.
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.
14
And this is slightly complicated.
What
ever dies, was not mix'd equally.
Now, the poem was written at a time when medical practice often believed that death
was caused by an imbalance of th
e humours. And as long as your humours were balanced,
you would live. When they were out of balance, you would die. So things die when they're
not balanced properly. Whatever the historical reasoning behind that, it's easy for us to
understand the sentimen
t that whatever dies, dies because it is not balanced properly. And
this sentiment is very useful for Donne in the love poem, because he's saying, 'our love has to
be balanced properly'. He says,
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that
none can slacken, none can die.
Now, if I paraphrase this, he's saying, in
If our two loves be one
, ‘If you love me as
much as I love you,’
If our two loves be one, and thou and I love so alike that none can
slacken
, ‘If you love me as much as I love
you, and we both continue to love each other as
much as I love you at the moment, none can die.'
None can die
would either mean we will live forever, or it would mean our love will
live forever.
But I think this final line raises a very interesting point,
that often goes unremarked
upon in discussion of this poem, that is to do with the response of the girl to what Donne is
saying. And we don't know what that is. Now, obviously, something very powerful, very
emotionally changing has occurred to Donne the n
ight before, whatever it may be. For he
says at the start of the second stanza,
And now good
-
morrow to our waking souls
. But he's
speaking for both of them there. It's '
our
waking souls', not '
my
waking soul'. But how does
he really know whether the emotio
ns that he feels are as powerful for the girl as they are for
him?
And of course, he doesn't.
He's being rather presumptuous in saying 'our waking souls'. But of course, to
convince the girl that he is in love with her, and that something has changed for
him, if he
just said, 'And now good morrow to
my
waking soul', it wouldn't sound as good, so he has to
15
rope the girl in as well. Now, whenever we hear a beautiful love poem like this, we always
think that the guy or the girl writing it deserves to be love
d in kind, and she or he is in fact
speaking for both partners. But there's no guarantee of that. For all we know, the girl may
hear this and think or say, 'Yeah thanks John, actually it's a very nice thing to say in the
morning, but honestly, last night w
asn't that great for me. Fun, but I've had better.' And John
goes away crying. Historically, we don't know whether that was the case. But remember, this
is an address to the girl. Donne can't speak for the girl in this. And this idea of him trying to
convi
nce the girl to love him as much as he loves her, or he claims to, is very relevant and
apparent in the final lines.
If
our two loves be one.
If.
‘If you love me as much as I love you.’ Because he doesn't know how much the girl
loves him. He's pitchi
ng this poem to her to, presumably, get her to say so.
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.
'Our love will live forever, or we will live forever, if you love me as much as I love
you.' And let's hope
for his sake that she does.
So I'll just drop back now to that third line,
But suck'd on country pleasures
childishly
.
What Donne is alluding to here in 'sucked on country pleasures childishly' is female
genitalia. In 'country pleasures', he is playin
g on the sound of the word 'cunt'. Shakespeare
does the same thing in Hamlet whereby Hamlet lies down in Ophelia's lap and, Ophelia is
somewhat shocked by the fact he's doing it, and Hamlet says, did you think I meant 'country
matters', by which he means m
atters of the cunt. Now as crass as this may sound to a modern
audience, we don't know whether the word had the same shock appeal then as it has now. But
it is there in the poem.
The sound of the word is something that Donne is playing with. And he means
16
vibrant, sexually
-
aware pleasures presumably. Specific sexual pleasures. But not spiritually
-
aware pleasure. When he says,
good
-
morrow to our waking souls
, in this instance their souls
are awake, and they are in love. Spiritually in love. That sort of love
. Prior to this, they had
been sexually active, animalistic, childish. And something has happened for his opinion of
the girl to have changed. And he's hoping she shares the same feelings.
So, 'sucked on country pleasures childishly'. For the full meaning
of that line, he is
referring to female genitalia for the purpose of referring to sexual pleasures, which have now
been transcended to the spiritual pleasures of their waking souls.
So when we look back to what Dr. Johnson said when I read out Johnson's
overall
appraisal of the metaphysical poets at the start, one of Johnson’s complaints is that there is a
kind of gratuitous display of learning from the metaphysical poets which somehow jumps out
at us too much. I'm not sure how much that is true of
The Go
od Morrow
. Maybe it is true of
other metaphysical poets and other poems by John Donne. As far as we could really accuse
The Good Morrow
of suffering from gratuitous displays of learning, we have the Seven
Sleepers' den, which we wouldn't know; the Plato ca
ve analogy, which perhaps we may not
know, but we're pretty sure is there; we have the knowledge that sea
-
discovery is happening
around that time, but who at the time when the poem was written would not know that; and
also the now out
-
of
-
date medical analy
sis of the humours. 'Whatever dies was not mixed
equally.' So I don't particularly see this as an unusually high frame of reference for Dr.
Johnson to get too excited about. I think Donne in this poem is exempt from the criticisms
Johnson makes.
I'll read
the poem through one more time. This is John Donne's
The Good Morrow
final read
-
through.
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 s
ights 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 tru
e 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 ca
die.
That was the Mycroft Online Lecture on John Donne's
The Good
-
Morrow.
I am Dr. Andrew Barker. Thank you, goodbye.
Dr
.
Andrew Barker
drandrewbarker.com
adbarker86@hotm
ail.co