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The Good Morrow
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
...

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
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May 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, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die
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Apostasy/apostic  leaving one’s own faith- his own religion was reformed when he
joined Protestantism, but he faced hell within the Catholic Church
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Donne then became an MP
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Anne More was the daughter of Sir George More, and also Egerton’s niece- Donne
betrayed his employer
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They married when she was 16 and he was 29 in December 1601
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They married during advent, which was not allowed in the new church
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Donne had lost his income, his home, his chance of promotion and most
importantly, his seat in parliament
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Form and Structure
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

This is written in iambic pentameter which may be a reflection of the rhythm of the
heartbeat
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This poem contains a unique rhyme scheme, as he splits each stanza into a quatrain
rhyming ABAB followed by a triplet CCC
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The three questions to
begin shows mutuality- he expects answers
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‘Troth’ was a word originally used in marriage ceremonies, meaning truth and loyalty
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‘Thou and I’ later becomes ‘we’ indicating a union and a tone of awe
is created
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‘Sucked’ and ‘country’
could present sexual innuendos and pun
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“Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?”
Donne, like the ‘seven sleepers’ would have been persecuted
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The Seven Sleepers’ Den was a legend of
miraculous survival
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There is imagery of comfort created here- many Catholics would
have believed and hoped that Catholicism would have been a main faith again
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If every any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee
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The two caesural pauses shows
the opposition of past and present
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They
were mere ‘fancies’ and were not realistic, they were superficial
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Plato tried to describe reality using the parable of prisoners in a cave
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When one escapes, they realise that the real world is reality
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There is a tonal shift as the poem moves into
the description of the relationship, and Donne recognises the existence of a ‘soulmate’
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“Which watch one another not out of fear,
For love, all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room, an everywhere
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The repetition
shows the significance of ‘love’
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The assonance presented in the poem gives a soothing atmosphere to the
poem, adding to the tone of awe
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“Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one and is one
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They have the power of love
to conquer vast spaces
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Stanza Three
“My face in thine eye, mine in thine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,”
There is chiasmus here to convey the all-consuming love- they belong to each other
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Eyes are the window to the soul, which was a reference to the
pseudoscience of phrenology
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In The Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes present a
story about soulmates
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He continues that there were three
genders: man, woman and the "Androgynous"
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The men were children of the sun, the
women were children of the earth and the Androgynous were children of the moon, which
was born of the sun and earth
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The gods were then faced with the prospect of destroying the
humans with lightning as they had done with the Titans but then they would lose the tributes
given to the gods by humans
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These split humans were in utter misery to the point where they would
not eat and would perish so Apollo had sewn them up and reconstituted their bodies with
the navel being the only remnant harkening back to their original form
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It is said that when the two find each other, there is an unspoken
understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lie with each other in unity
and would know no greater joy than that
...
”

‘Mixed equally’ is a reference to the alchemy of indestructible
love
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This was proposed
by Galen (129-216), a Greek physician
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However, this could also be a reference to medieval
Thomist philosophy on ideas about the difference between earthly bodies and heavenly
bodies
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There could also be
the notion of death as an orgasm here, ‘le petit mort’

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