The Good-Morrow by John Donne: Summary

The Good-Morrow is a metaphysical love poem by John Donne, originally published in his 1633 collection of Songs and Sonnets. This three stanza poem revolves around two main metaphors, a couple of lovers waking into a new life, and a new world created by their love.

As the poem opens the speaker, after being woken up together from the night spent together, tells his beloved before they met each other what they had done was all childish play. They were merely babies nursing from the mother’s breast and indulging in country pleasures. He reflects that those parts of their lives to be as worthless as the ones spent in slumber by the seven sleepers of Ephesus. He compares their true love with the past pleasures and finds all the past pleasures as fancies. He, moreover, asserts that he had only dreamt of the true beauty, that is, his beloved whom he has got now.

A glorious and happy greeting to their soul opens the second stanza. They are now awaken in the true world of love and they do not have to be fearful and jealous in terms of losing each other. Here, the speaker and his beloved have moved to the spiritual world of love. They are now complete and other beauties of the materialistic world do not distract them. Their small room where they make love is the whole world for them now. He does not consider the new discoveries of the sea an important thing now because for him his beloved is the pure world of love and discoveries.

The speaker in the third stanza praises the strong bond of love they share. He can see his image in her eyes and she is in his eyes. Their mutual love reflects their image so well that their hearts are clearly seen in their eyes. When the world is divided into hemispheres, their love is united and crosses all the boundaries of the physical world. At the end of the poem, the speaker applauses the immortality of their love. He says that when two things mixes the purity of the matter loses and it becomes weak. But, their love is not like any mixture, but the mixture of platonic love. So, their bondage cannot be slackened, and their love cannot be killed as it is immortal and pure love.

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Shrestha, Roma. "The Good-Morrow by John Donne: Summary." BachelorandMaster, 28 Feb. 2018, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/the-good-morrow-summary.html.