Critical Appreciation
The poems opens in the usual manner of Donne’s openings. The first stanza describes the contrast between a life without love and a life passionate love. In this subsequent stanzas it is pointed out that the world of love is as good as the physical word. The poem is remarkable for its logic and argument.
The Good-Morrow is not merely a solution of a new day but a solution of passionate love.
“till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till them?
The souls of the lovers have awakened to a new day, and a new life. No love, nor fear, restricts their attention to each other and makes their little room a world. No map-reader can find a world more wonderful than they find in each other.
The poem provides a fine example of Donne’s wit. `This wit consists in the contrast between the two worlds;
‘the world of lovers and the geographical world”.
There is then a complexity of attitudes in the poem. But the lover, who speaks the poem, gives no hint of being involved in an ironical situation, or of entertaining any complexity of attitudes.
“He dismisses the geographical world and affirms the world of love”.
Leonard Unger
The imagery of this poem, says Grierson, has been drawn from a variety of sources ¾ myth, “the seven sleepers den, everyday life, `Suck’d on country pleasures and wishing in the morning, `one little room’, the geographical world, `sea-discoveries’, Maps’, hemispheres’, and lastly, the scholastic philosophy. The sources of Donne’s imagery are varied and range from scholastic philosophy to the facts of everyday life.
To quote F.M. Payne,
“In the little poem we have the adult manner of Donne.”
Practically every element is present.
In stanzas two and three, we find the type of imagery which distinguished him from his contemporaries. Temperamentally averse to the sweetness and artificiality of the love-poetry of his time, he attempts realism as has been already seen in his satires. Tired of the worn out conventions of classical imager, he turns to the contemporary life in which he had vivid interest.
A conceit is a fanciful idea, image or comparison. Conceit is very polished form of wit (to make relevant or irrelevant things one). Donne often gives us unusual, bold and daring conceits. His conceits often startle, astonish, shock and even baffle us. The conceits in this poem may briefly be indicated. They are as follows:
Before falling in love, these lovers were asleep, but now their souls have woke up. These lovers cannot die because they love each other equally and their two lovers are one. It will be noted that none of these ideas is realistic. They are all the product of fancy.
Donne’s main concern here is to prove an experience of love passionately, whole heartedly, body and soul. But the feeling through intensely passionate and intensely personal, that he is trying to communicate. The proposition has been made: love.
`makes one little roome, an every where’.
Now he tries to prove how it is so. First he contrasts it with the geographical world, sea-discoverers etc. But they are again like the foolish children of the first stanza. Each of the lovers is an explorer, a sea-discoverer, the individual in love a world of his or her.
Having established that ‘one little roome’ is every where and the world discovered by lovers is as good the new world discovered by the sea-explorers, Donne in the last stanza proves the superiority of the lover’s world.
`Love so alike, that one doe slacken, none can die’.
Playing upon the recent discovery of two hemispheres of the globe, Donne compares the reflection of each lover’s fact into the eye up a better world than the geographical one. Without sharp North’ may refer to the depression of the earth at the North pole or to the extreme, deadly cold of the region. Declining West’ where the sun goes down, both these features sharp North and declining West symbolize decay of life and death.
In the last three lines a metaphysical proposition made by St. Thomas Acquinas, the father of Scholasticism, is implied. St. Acquinas says the corruption occurs only when there is contrariety.
The Good-Morrow thus illustrates all the attributes which according to Sir Grierson have earned the epithet `metaphysical poet or John Donne.
The poems opens in the usual manner of Donne’s openings. The first stanza describes the contrast between a life without love and a life passionate love. In this subsequent stanzas it is pointed out that the world of love is as good as the physical word. The poem is remarkable for its logic and argument.
The Good-Morrow is not merely a solution of a new day but a solution of passionate love.
“till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till them?
The souls of the lovers have awakened to a new day, and a new life. No love, nor fear, restricts their attention to each other and makes their little room a world. No map-reader can find a world more wonderful than they find in each other.
The poem provides a fine example of Donne’s wit. `This wit consists in the contrast between the two worlds;
‘the world of lovers and the geographical world”.
There is then a complexity of attitudes in the poem. But the lover, who speaks the poem, gives no hint of being involved in an ironical situation, or of entertaining any complexity of attitudes.
“He dismisses the geographical world and affirms the world of love”.
Leonard Unger
The imagery of this poem, says Grierson, has been drawn from a variety of sources ¾ myth, “the seven sleepers den, everyday life, `Suck’d on country pleasures and wishing in the morning, `one little room’, the geographical world, `sea-discoveries’, Maps’, hemispheres’, and lastly, the scholastic philosophy. The sources of Donne’s imagery are varied and range from scholastic philosophy to the facts of everyday life.
To quote F.M. Payne,
“In the little poem we have the adult manner of Donne.”
Practically every element is present.
In stanzas two and three, we find the type of imagery which distinguished him from his contemporaries. Temperamentally averse to the sweetness and artificiality of the love-poetry of his time, he attempts realism as has been already seen in his satires. Tired of the worn out conventions of classical imager, he turns to the contemporary life in which he had vivid interest.
A conceit is a fanciful idea, image or comparison. Conceit is very polished form of wit (to make relevant or irrelevant things one). Donne often gives us unusual, bold and daring conceits. His conceits often startle, astonish, shock and even baffle us. The conceits in this poem may briefly be indicated. They are as follows:
Before falling in love, these lovers were asleep, but now their souls have woke up. These lovers cannot die because they love each other equally and their two lovers are one. It will be noted that none of these ideas is realistic. They are all the product of fancy.
Donne’s main concern here is to prove an experience of love passionately, whole heartedly, body and soul. But the feeling through intensely passionate and intensely personal, that he is trying to communicate. The proposition has been made: love.
`makes one little roome, an every where’.
Now he tries to prove how it is so. First he contrasts it with the geographical world, sea-discoverers etc. But they are again like the foolish children of the first stanza. Each of the lovers is an explorer, a sea-discoverer, the individual in love a world of his or her.
Having established that ‘one little roome’ is every where and the world discovered by lovers is as good the new world discovered by the sea-explorers, Donne in the last stanza proves the superiority of the lover’s world.
`Love so alike, that one doe slacken, none can die’.
Playing upon the recent discovery of two hemispheres of the globe, Donne compares the reflection of each lover’s fact into the eye up a better world than the geographical one. Without sharp North’ may refer to the depression of the earth at the North pole or to the extreme, deadly cold of the region. Declining West’ where the sun goes down, both these features sharp North and declining West symbolize decay of life and death.
In the last three lines a metaphysical proposition made by St. Thomas Acquinas, the father of Scholasticism, is implied. St. Acquinas says the corruption occurs only when there is contrariety.
The Good-Morrow thus illustrates all the attributes which according to Sir Grierson have earned the epithet `metaphysical poet or John Donne.
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