Selected Poems by John Donne

The Good-Morrow

Donne’s opening is a typically colloquial one, in which the speaker seems to engage the reader in conversation, though, in fact, he is addressing his mistress. In this way, the reader is drawn immediately into the intimacy of the situation: that of two lovers awakening after their first night together (the traditional subject of an aubade ).

In contrast with the intimacy of the situation, however, love is presented intellectually by the speaker as a mystical apprehension of unity . The word ‘one’ is used six times in the poem (including a triplet of ones in a single line). The vision of all things in their diversity collapsed to a simple unity is quite a common mystical and metaphysical insight. The speaker’s conceit is that the lovers have created an ‘everywhere’ in their physical union of two in one that is to be preferred to the real world of explorers and cartographers: in their bedchamber all is unified.

As the two faces of the lovers interlink through the reflections in the pupils of each one’s eye, so might two hemispheres combine to make a single globe. The speaker’s ‘everywhere’ is, in fact, a greater achievement than any attempt of ‘sea-discoverers’ to encompass the world, or of a cartographer gazing upon a map depicting the whole surface of the globe.