The Good-Morrow Summary

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Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare

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“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.

Read the full text of “The Good-Morrow”

“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

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.

See where this theme is active in the poem.

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.

See where this theme is active in the poem.

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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5-7 of “The Good-Morrow,” and get the Line-
by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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“The Good-Morrow” Symbols

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.

See where this symbol appears in the poem.

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.

See where this symbol appears in the poem.

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.

See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“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.

See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

End-Stopped Line

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Stopped Line in “The Good-Morrow,” and get
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