Essay #2 Rakesh Penumalli
Analysis of “The Good Morrow”
“Love is everything. It is the key to life, and its influences are those that move the world.” Even though this was said by Ralph Waldo Trine, an American author, in a way still applies to the argument made in “The Good Morrow,” by John Donne. In the poem “The Good Morrow,” John Donne conveys to the reader, the message that love is above all and nothing can surpass it. Donne supports this argument of his, mainly by using the progression of diction and imagery through the three stanzas of the poem.
In the first stanza, the speaker and the lover are in a deep sleep and almost a coma (the reference to the “seven sleepers’ den”) where they have not experienced the true power of love yet. Therefore consider everything they did to be childish, and nothing but child’s play. For example, line seven, “Which I desir’d, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee,” which shows how their ignorance led to their inability to experience love, but only to experience dreams. The diction of the beginning of the stanza is negative and cacophonous, in lines one through four, like “not,” and “suck’d” respectively, but ends up to be positive and euphonious, for example, “fancies,” and “beauty.” These characteristics of the first stanza allude to the time before dawn, of their lives, when they did not love each other and were sleeping ignorantly, while the rest of the world passed by, similar to what the world would do before sunrise. And dreams only occur when one is sleeping, which is usually at times before sunrise, in other words it is before one wakes up from their sleep. It also alludes to the childish state of the progression of love and life.
