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The Good-Morrow Summary & Analysis
by John Donne

The Good-Morrow Summary & Analysis
by John Donne

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “The Good-Morrow”

1I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

2Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

3But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

4Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

5’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

6If ever any beauty I did see,

7Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

8And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

9Which watch not one another out of fear;

10For love, all love of other sights controls,

11And makes one little room an everywhere.

12Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

13Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

14Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

15My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

16And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

17Where can we find two better hemispheres,

18Without sharp north, without declining west?

19Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;

20If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

21Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

  • “The Good-Morrow” Introduction

    • “The Good Morrow” is an aubade—a morning love poem—written by the English poet John Donne, likely in the 1590s. In it, the speaker describes love as a profound experience that's almost like a religious epiphany. Indeed, the poem claims that erotic love can produce the same effects that religion can. Through love, the speaker’s soul awakens; because of love, the speaker abandons the outside world; in love, the speaker finds immortality. This is a potentially subversive argument, for two reasons. First, because the poem suggests that all love—even love outside of marriage—might have this transformative, enlightening effect. Second, because of the idea that romantic love can mirror the joys and revelations of religious devotion.

  • “The Good-Morrow” Summary

    • 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

    • Theme Love as an Awakening

      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.

    • Theme Exploration and Adventure

      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”

    • Lines 1-4

      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?

      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.

    • Lines 5-7

      ’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.

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    • Lines 8-11

      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.

    • Lines 12-14

      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.

    • Lines 15-18

      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?

    • Lines 19-21

      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 Good-Morrow” Symbols

    • Symbol Morning

      Morning

      When the speaker bids “good-morrow” to “our waking souls,” he or she is likely being literal, inviting the reader to imagine that the two lovers have spent the night in bed together and are watching the sunrise. However, there are also several symbols associated with the rising sun. First, the sun can symbolize rebirth. Second, it is closely associated with Jesus Christ, in part because “sun” and “son” sound so much alike. Finally, it can also symbolize insight or enlightenment. Indeed, the word “enlightenment”—which means “liberated from ignorance”—contains the word light.

      Overall, the “morrow” in this poem symbolizes the experience of learning or realizing something so important that it feels like a religious conversion or profound insight. The literal and symbolic senses of the “morrow” are thus linked together: because the lovers have spent the night together, they now experience an awakening of their “souls,” which is so powerful it feels religious.

    • Symbol Little Room

      Little Room

      The speaker and his or her lover occupy a “little room” together—a place they find so fulfilling and full of joy that the speaker proposes they abandon the rest of the world and stay there forever. This is likely a literal place, referring to the room where the lovers have spent the night together before waking up to the "good-morrow."

      But the "little room" also symbolizes the idea of poetry as a place of refuge. “Little room” is a literal translation of the Italian word “stanza.” The word “stanza” is important in the study of poetry: it describes a group of lines that form a smaller unit within a poem. With this understanding in mind, it seems that the “little room” may be more than a literal place: it may be a symbol for the poem itself. In other words, it may be unreasonable to expect that the “little room” will literally serve as an “everywhere” for the lovers—they will eventually have to leave it for some reason or another. But the poem itself might serve as such a refuge for them, a place where they can enjoy their love forever, without interruption.

    • Symbol Hearts

      Hearts

      Here, the image of the lovers' "hearts" serves as a symbol for their close emotional bond. The heart is the organ that pumps blood—though John Donne didn’t know that. It wasn’t until after Donne's death that William Harvey even proved that the blood circulated through the body. But Donne did know that the heart was central to the body, important to health and life. He understood that in some sense, the heart was the core of the body, the thing on which everything else relied.

      The speaker thus uses the heart as a symbol toward the end of the poem. In this instance, the heart is not a physical organ (if it were, it couldn’t “rest” in the “faces” of the lovers). Rather, it represents the truth of a person—their true character, undisguised and honest. For the speaker, to see someone’s heart is to know who they truly are, and the symbol of the heart helps convey how intimately the lovers know each other.

  • “The Good-Morrow” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Enjambment

      “The Good-Morrow” contains few moments of enjambment. When the poem does use enjambment, it does not employ any strict pattern: the enjambments are scattered irregularly throughout the poem, with one in the opening line and two more in lines 6 and 20 (recall that enjambment need not always align with punctuation, and is more concerned with the grammatical unit of one line spilling over onto the next—which is why line 6 is enjambed).

      Notably, however, two of the poem’s three enjambments fall in the second-to-last line of a stanza. This is potentially significant since the poem’s meter switches after those lines (line 6 and line 20): where the first six lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameter, the final line is in iambic hexameter. The final lines (line 7 and line 21) of these two stanzas stretch out across the added syllables, and the speaker’s thoughts stretch out with them, breaking the pattern of keeping each thought in its own line—a boundary the speaker otherwise largely respects. (However, the speaker is careful to avoid using this strategy too often: the penultimate line of stanza two is not enjambed).

      The poem’s first enjambment is its most suggestive and interesting. Line 1 is a grammatically incomplete unit: its verb is the first word of line 2, “Did.” “Thou and I” stands by itself, cut off from the verb—and the activities that verb describes. This enjambment allows the speaker to separate the lovers from what they did before they knew each other; it's as if the speaker is building a kind of quarantine that cuts them off from the past and highlights how insignificant it was. The speaker again highlights the words "thou and I" with the enjambment at the end of line 20, echoing the end of line 1 and reinforcing that the two lovers are the true core of the poem (and perhaps the world).

      Enjambment thus does not have a broad, global significance in the poem, but it is often suggestive and meaningful in its individual instances.

    • End-Stopped Line

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    • Caesura

    • Apostrophe

    • Allusion

    • Anaphora

    • Rhetorical Question

    • Alliteration

    • Assonance

    • Consonance

    • Chiasmus

  • “The Good-Morrow” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Troth
    • Thou
    • Weaned
    • Country Pleasures
    • Snorted
    • Seven Sleepers' Den
    • Fancies
    • Morrow
    • Controls
    • Thine
    • Plain
    • Hemispheres
    • Declining
    • Slacken
    Troth

    • A strong oath of affirmation. “By my troth” means something like “On my honor” or “I swear it.”

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Good-Morrow”

    • Form

      During his life—and afterwards—John Donne was famous for his sloppiness in the formal aspects of poetry. Ben Jonson, one of Donne’s contemporaries, and himself an accomplished formalist, complained: “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.” Jonson was so offended by Donne’s mishandling of poetic form that he joked (or perhaps even thought) that Donne should be executed! But Donne’s sloppy attention to form comes with some advantages: his poems are often unusual and original. Instead of following traditional forms, they develop their own idiosyncratic forms.

      “The Good-Morrow” is a good example of Donne's unique approach to form. The poem has three stanzas, each with seven lines. This is very unusual: most English stanzas have an even number of lines. This helps poets keep their rhyme schemes orderly and symmetrical, since it’s awkward to fit an extra line into the rhyme scheme. And Donne’s poem does have a strange rhyme scheme.

      Each seven-line stanza is rhymed ABABCCC, and each can be divided into two units: a quatrain and a tercet. The initial quatrains are rhymed ABAB, while the final tercets are rhymed CCC. To make matters even stranger, the poem’s meter is irregular. The first six lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameter; the final line is in iambic hexameter.

      The poem's odd form thus cries out for interpretation, but it is not entirely clear what it means.The break between the two parts of the stanza acts as a kind of volta, or a turn in the poem's thinking. But these breaks are not particularly strong. In Petrarchan sonnets, for instance, the volta is usually an occasion for the speaker to reconsider and to change his or her mind. The speaker here generally does not do so; that is, the stanzas feel like single conceptual units that each express one idea, despite their voltas.

      Another possible interpretation is that breaking each stanza into two distinct parts is meant to symbolize the two distinct parts of the lovers' lives: they used to be asleep, and now they are "waking." Or one might see the first four lines of each stanza as imitating the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet, which has the same rhyme scheme and meter as the quatrains here do, before splitting into something different in the tercet. The poem’s form is unusual and thus invites interpretation, but with so many different possibilities, readers will have to decide for themselves exactly how to interpret it.

    • Meter

      "The Good-Morrow” has two meters. The first six lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameter (five poetic feet with a da DUM rhythm, creating a total of ten syllables per line) while the final line of each is in iambic hexameter (six poetic feet and twelve syllables per line). `

      For example, look at the pattern of lines 20 and 21 (and also note that the first foot of line 21 could also be scanned as starting with two stressed syllables, creating a spondee):

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

      By the time Donne wrote “The Good-Morrow,” in the late 1590s or early 1600s, iambic pentameter was already a prestigious meter. Marlowe and Shakespeare used it for great tragedies like Edward II and Romeo and Juliet; several centuries before, Chaucer—then the most famous English poet—had used it for poems like The Canterbury Tales. The meter was used for the most serious, elevated topics.

      To use it in a love poem like “The Good-Morrow” is thus almost provocative: it seems like a misuse of a meter designed for more important ideas. But the speaker argues in “The Good-Morrow” that love is as important and powerful as any heroic quest: it “makes one little room an everywhere.” It seems that the speaker is being intentionally provocative, using the meter to underline and strengthen the poem's argument for the dignity and importance of love.

      In the final line of each stanza, the speaker switches from iambic pentameter to iambic hexameter. This meter is not widely used in English poetry, though it is the standard meter for much French poetry (where it is called an alexandrine). The reasons for this switch are not entirely clear. Perhaps the speaker wishes to make the poem feel international and emphasize once again that love encompasses the entire world.

      The switch between iambic pentameter and iambic hexameter is not standard in English poetry, and it does not correspond to any inherited form. But while the poem is careful to preserve this metrical pattern, it does not pay as much attention to the details within the lines of meter. “The Good-Morrow” is full of metrical substitutions, as in line 12:

      Let sea discoverers to new worlds have gone

      The line’s third foot is a pyrrhic (the two unstressed syllables of that conclude the word "discoverers"). The fourth foot ("to new") returns to an iambic rhythm, but its final three syllables are confused and ambiguous. They could be scanned as a dactyl, though “gone” is a strong word and likely carries at least some stress. Perhaps it is better scanned as two trochees, with a catalectic final foot. The details of how to scan the line are ultimately unimportant: what matters is how far the line strays from a standard iambic rhythm. What's more, it does so at the end of the line, a place where poets usually try especially hard to maintain good meter.

      Even when the speaker keeps good meter, the metrical feet are often divided by caesuras, as in the next line:

      Let maps | to oth- | -er, worlds | on worlds | have shown,

      The line is technically good iambic pentameter, but the caesura in the middle of the third foot upsets the rhythm, creating an awkward syncopation. Again, the poem’s meter is not particularly skillful; the speaker’s attention seems to be elsewhere, perhaps tied up with thoughts of his or her lover.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      “The Good-Morrow” has an unusual, innovative rhyme scheme. The first four lines of each stanza are a rhyming quatrain:

      ABAB

      This is a widely used rhyme scheme in English; for instance, the first twelve lines of a Shakespearean sonnet follow this pattern.

      However, the next three lines of each stanza diverge sharply from standard English rhyme patterns. Each stanza concludes with a rhyming tercet:

      CCC

      The stanzas are thus internally divided between the two rhyme schemes. This would seem to encourage a division between the content of the two parts of the stanza, a kind of volta. For instance, the second stanza introduces anaphora in its final three lines, repeating the word “let.” But the stanzas do not draw a clear conceptual distinction between their first four lines and their final three: instead, each one generally reads as an expression of a single idea.

      The poem’s rhyme scheme thus invites interpretation, but it is difficult to say exactly what it means. Each reader may develop a different understanding of it. However, there are some plausible possibilities. For instance, the first four lines of each, with their criss-cross rhyme, feel quite different from the repeated single rhyme in the final tercet. The former suggests distance and difference; the latter, intimacy and proximity. Perhaps the rhyme scheme reflects the transformation that the poem itself recounts: the distance that once separated the lovers has been replaced by intense closeness, just as the rhymes in each stanza go from distant to close.

      The difficulties in interpreting the poem’s rhyme scheme are also compounded by the speaker’s rather casual attitude toward the rhyme itself. The poem contains four slant rhymes: between “I” and “childishly” in lines 1 and 3, “fear” and “everywhere” in lines 9 and 11, between “gone,” “shown” and “one” in lines 12-14, and finally between “equally,” “I,” and “die” in lines 19-21. This is an unusually high number of slant rhymes for such a short poem, and these imperfections indicate that the speaker is perhaps too overcome with excitement about his or her lover to bother with such formal details.

  • “The Good-Morrow” Speaker

    • The speaker of “The Good-Morrow” is an anonymous lover. The poem does not provide much information about this lover; the reader does not even learn the speaker’s name or gender (though almost all scholars assume the speaker is male), nor the speaker’s class, profession, or nationality. Similarly, the poem refrains from giving its readers much information about the speaker’s lover—though it seems that, whoever he or she is, the speaker does not resent or resist the speaker. Unlike some of Donne’s other poems, like “The Flea” where the speaker pleads with a recalcitrant lover, “The Good-Morrow” seems to describe a happy, mutually fulfilling love affair.

      In a way, the anonymity of the speaker and his or her lover is fitting: neither of them has any identity in the poem outside of their love for each other. “The Good-Morrow” is a poem about how love “makes one little room an everywhere.” Love, the speaker argues, is as good as, if not better than, seeking one’s fortune and happiness in the outside world. The speaker seems to take this argument to heart by allowing his or her identity to come entirely from love. Beyond that love, the speaker is anonymous and indistinct, but within it, the speaker leads a life of vibrancy and passion.

  • “The Good-Morrow” Setting

    • The speaker of “The Good-Morrow” actively refuses to engage with the world, preferring instead the satisfactions of an intimate, loving relationship. But the speaker does not consider this to be a sacrifice; rather, he or she focuses on the way that love is, in itself, an adventure as satisfying and rich as any explorer’s journey across the sea. Love, the speaker insists, “makes one little room an everywhere.” It seems reasonable, then, to take the speaker’s word when it comes to the poem's setting. It likely takes places in just such a “little room”: the speaker and his or her lover are lying next to each reflecting on the beauty and passion of their love.

      The poem thus comes from a specific relationship in a specific time and place. But the speaker does not provide much information about that time and place, and he or she does not allude to the historical or political events that surround the poem’s love affair. This gives the poem a potentially universal feeling: it could describe any relationship, in any time and any place. Although the poem was written in a specific historical moment—the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in England, at the end of the 16th century—its focus on the satisfactions of love allows it to transcend this immediate setting and speak to nearly any point in history.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “The Good-Morrow”

      Literary Context

      “The Good-Morrow” was likely written at the end of the 1590s or in the early 1600s. The 1590s were an unusually rich decade for English love poetry. Prompted by the 1590 publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella—a sonnet sequence dedicated to the unrequited love between a man (Astrophil) and a distant, uninterested lady (Stella)—many English poets dedicated themselves to writing love sonnets. Following Sidney’s example, they wrote long series of such sonnets, and these series tended to focus on unrequited love.

      By the time John Donne wrote “The Good-Morrow,” the enthusiasm for such poems was beginning to die out. In the first decade of the 17th century, the sonnet lost its popularity. (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, first published in 1609, sold poorly, despite his immense popularity in the period as a poet and a playwright). Accordingly, Donne’s poem tries to find new energy—a new way of writing about love. It breaks formally with the other poets writing about love in the 1590s; though it shares some formal elements with Shakespearean sonnets, it is not a sonnet. What's more, it does not describe unrequited love. Instead, the poem celebrates a mutually rewarding relationship between people, a love so powerful it creates its own world. Instead of distance between the speaker and his or her beloved, as in most sonnets, the poem describes (and cherishes) the distance between the unified lovers and the world around them. In “The Good-Morrow,” the reader thus encounters a poet actively wrestling with and trying to transform the literary traditions and practices of his moment.

      The poem also implicitly refers to an important Renaissance philosophical doctrine: the microcosm and the macrocosm. Renaissance thinkers believed that the part and the whole reflected each other, serving as images of each other. So, for instance, the human body could be a microcosm (a miniature image) of the universe as a whole. Donne's speaker believes that the lovers' bedroom serves in a similar capacity: it is an "everywhere." Though it is only part of the universe, the passion and intensity of their love turn their home into an image of the whole world.

      Historical Context

      “The Good-Morrow” actively suppresses its historical context. The speaker and his or her lover retreat from politics into “one little room”; that is, they make a rich and satisfying world out of the intensity of their love for each other. They have no interest in the wider world. The speaker describes that wider world only in the most general terms, outlining what he or she will gladly refuse for love.

      But the things the speaker refuses are revealing; they situate the speaker in a particular moment in history. When the speaker imagines the broader world and its most appealing possibilities, he or she thinks of exploration, crossing the sea, and discovering and mapping new worlds. This locates the speaker in a period of colonization, just as Europeans began to settle the Americas. Indeed, in the 1590s, when Donne wrote the poem, Spanish colonization of the Caribbean and Latin America had been underway for more than a century. English privateers like Sir Francis Drake were regularly raiding Spanish settlements and stealing the gold the Spaniards mined (using indigenous people as slaves) in the Americas. For the speaker, however, this is all far away and irrelevant to his or her life; the poem refuses to engage with the realities of colonialism as it developed in the 16th century. This distance from historical context allows the poem to feel universal. That is, the love that it celebrates seems independent from any particular historical moment and may thus be applicable to any passionate love affair.

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