Q: What are the different stages of love you find in “The Good Morrow”?
Ans: “The Good Morrow” is one of the most outstanding love poems written by John Donne. In the poem, the theme of love has been developed from surprise to confidence and then to immortality in the tradition of metaphysical poetry. In it, Donne has presented three stages of love by using different kinds of images. In the poem “The Good Morrow” Donne depicted that love begins with surprise and it develops into complacency and then ends in spirituality.
The Poem is divided into three stanzas. These stanzas deal with three stages of love.
The first stanza deals with the poet’s experience of love. The poem opens colloquially striking a note of surprise:
” I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? “
The opening of the poem shows the poet’s amazement and surprise at his new discovery of love that they had already been in love before they become aware of it. The innocence of love at this stage has been compared with that of breastfed babies. By using this image, Donne shows the fact that before consumption their love was immature and childish. In this stanza, Donne brings out the biblical images ‘seven sleepers den’ to suggest that they were caught in an illusion and were blind to reality. Through this image, the unconsciousness of their love has been shown. All pleasure that they enjoyed before consumption of love were mere fancies.
The second stanza turns the surprise into confidence. It suggests that the lovers’ passion for love is saturated. Here, the lover very confidently invites his beloved to welcome their love. He compares each of them to two separate worlds and says that they together constitute a single World. In this stanza, he generalizes that true love saves a lover from falling in love with others. He feels that their small room is the prototype of the whole world. It is complete in itself. They need nothing else. In this stanza the speaker uses a conceit to suggest his contentment in love —
” Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west? “
The speaker’s immense satisfaction and strong confidence have been suggested in these lines.
The third stanza reveals the future of their love where both the poet and his beloved become immortal. According to the poet, in this world each unequally mixed thing get decay but the union between the lover and his beloved is mixed equally and never decays. The passions of the lovers are equally intense and so their love will never die. Through the following lines, the poet asserts that their love is eternal —
” If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die. “
These lines imply that the lovers love each other very intensely and they will continue to love each other in the future even after death. In fact, here Donne presents the power of spiritual love.
To sum up, we can say that poet presents love with the help of various images and analyses its different stages. Their love starts from surprise develops into contentment and ends in spirituality and immortality. The three stages of love have been shown/depicted very clearly by Donne.
