The Good Morrow by John Donne - as a metaphysical poem

The Good Morrow

John Donne

Q. Discuss The Good Morrow by John Donne as a metaphysical poetry.

Answer: As the term ‘metaphysics’ implies, it is a study of abstract concepts; when ‘meta’ means beyond and ‘physics’ means the science of concrete things. Metaphysical poetry mainly deals with concepts like love, faith, soul, death and God. The main features of allegorical poetry are: abrupt introduction, argumentative expression of sensitive content, intellect and allegorical concepts, tone of conversation, language of conversation, mixture of thoughts and feelings, combination of individual images and irregular rhythmic arrangement. John Donne is one of those poets and bears the signature sign of his "The Good Morrow" as an allegorical love poem.

Love is the main melody of the poem. The poem opens dramatically. They wanted to know from their boyfriend what they did before they fell in love. This question is asked in the morning after the experience of the last night of making love. This form of sexual love seems to be more significant and powerful than any other form of love. By comparison, their love for sucking from their mother's breast, for admiring the beautiful scenery of the whole country, and for their sleepless nights, is immature, childish, and full of ignorance.

Clearly here is the transition from physical to spiritual love, the time of waking up from sleep, the sensitive presence to the ideal reality and as if moving from the plastic cave to the world of light of the poet and his beloved. Here the poet seems to have touched on the metaphor of Plato.

Another feature of metaphorical poetry is the use of arrogance, i.e. the use of far-fetched analogy in abundance of "The Good Morrow". Unconscious lovers have been compared to breast-fed babies. Estimates from these various sources - 'Seven Slippers Den' (Roman mythology), 'Sea Discoverers', 'Maps', 'Sharp North', 'Declining West', 'Hemisphere' (geography), ‘whatever days was not mixed equally' (Scholastic philosophy).

Naturally, allegorical poems include rational expressions of sensitive content. "The Good Morrow" presents love in a logical way and is made on a seemingly logical stage and the connections "but", "if", "or", "and", "for" etc. also move logically from the past to the future. Lovers' beliefs and doubts about the immortality of their love are logically represented:

Since lovers basically love each other with equal intensity and passion, lovers argue that they will continue their love for each other until death and even after death.

The tone of the speaker in the poem is conversational, simple and colloquial. The vocabulary is at once affectionate and receptive: not 'wean’d', 'sucked', 'childhood-related', 'touching', etc. 'Morrow', 'Troth', 'Slacken' are the colloquial words that build the tradition of metaphysical poetry.

"The Good Morrow" celebrates the true wisdom of the metaphysical style of love. Thus, the sudden onset, the abstract theme (love), its logical and argumentative development using conjecture, the use of colloquial words in the tone of the traditional manner, and the absence of rhythmic format must place "The Good Morrow" in the genre of metaphysical poetry.

*****

👉 The Good Morrow by John Donne – Critical appraisal

👉 The Canonization - dramatic situation represented by John Donne