“The Good-Morrow” Commentary

“The Good-Morrow” by John Donne is yet another poem about love by Donne, in which he expresses the feelings and effect of love through metaphors and imagery. The metaphors and imagery are split into three different phases; before love, as seen in the first stanza, during love, as seen in the second stanza, and finally, what love is, or the total accumulation of what love is, as seen in the third stanza.
In the first stanza, Donne expresses how pointless life was without love. The main metaphor used to express this was with the line “But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?” Donne compares how his life before love was simple, or meaningless, through using country pleasures. “Country pleasures” is meant to mean lust based relationships, meaningless relationships.
The second stanza is used to talk about how love makes one feel. Donne says that love “makes one little room an everywhere.” The little room refers to how love, physically, is a small thing between two people, however mentally, love is unconfined to “a little room,” it is boundless, it is anything and everything.
Finally, in the last stanza, Donne tries to express what love is through the metaphor “Where can we find two better hemispheres, without sharp north, without declining west.” In using hemispheres, Donne makes a comment how there are two parts to the one whole, two hemispheres to the one world, two people to make up one world. However, Donne further comments upon the overall unity of love by stating how though though the two hemispheres are separate, they are “without sharp north, without declining west,” meaning that they do not have bounds or limits. So Donne is saying that though physically two people in love are separate, they make up one whole, and are not bound to stay separate.
Throughout the poem, Donne uses imagery and metaphors to communicate the ideas and feelings he has about love, to help everyone understand and relate to his ideas of love.