Selected Poems by John Donne
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The lovers’ awakening to oneness is also compared to the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus – Christians who fled from persecution into a cave where they believed themselves to have slept just one night, but awoke centuries later to find the world had converted to their faith while they ‘snor’d.’ Suddenly, for them too, the world was one.
The idea of oneness usually includes some degree of plurality, or there is no actual unification of anything. This creates a tension in the ideas of the poem: the lovers are ‘one,’ but they are also, obviously, two. The last line of stanza two suggests this duality in unity: ‘Let us possess one world’ (the unification of ‘everywhere’ in one room); ‘each hath one’ (each of the lovers possesses the other, who is ‘their whole world’); ‘and is one’ (and is one with the other). The last phrase, however, is ambiguous: if it is read as ‘each...is one,’ this implies that ‘each is one separate from the other.’ Donne is perhaps enjoying the way in which language itself breaks down under the pressure of having to describe unity in plurality.
The poem’s conclusion has a similar tension. If both lovers are ‘one’ completely, then their love will be perfect and eternal: ‘none can die’ (‘none’ here meaning ‘nothing’). But if the lovers are two and unite as a mixture or compound, then according to the science of the day, there had to be perfect balance of the four elements in a substance for it to endure (gold had this stability, for example, whereas wood did not). The speaker provides an alternative to their ‘oneness’ in which the lovers are seen as two equal elements in a compound substance: ‘or thou and I/Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die’ – in other words, their love will endure forever if it is perfectly balanced and equal.
John Dryden famously criticised Donne’s school of poetry as one which sought to ‘affect the metaphysics.’ The Good-Morrow seems a good example of this, though no metaphysical philosophy is require to understand what Donne means in claiming that two lovers are made one by their love, or that their bedroom becomes ‘everywhere’ to them.
The idea of oneness usually includes some degree of plurality, or there is no actual unification of anything. This creates a tension in the ideas of the poem: the lovers are ‘one,’ but they are also, obviously, two. The last line of stanza two suggests this duality in unity: ‘Let us possess one world’ (the unification of ‘everywhere’ in one room); ‘each hath one’ (each of the lovers possesses the other, who is ‘their whole world’); ‘and is one’ (and is one with the other). The last phrase, however, is ambiguous: if it is read as ‘each...is one,’ this implies that ‘each is one separate from the other.’ Donne is perhaps enjoying the way in which language itself breaks down under the pressure of having to describe unity in plurality.
The poem’s conclusion has a similar tension. If both lovers are ‘one’ completely, then their love will be perfect and eternal: ‘none can die’ (‘none’ here meaning ‘nothing’). But if the lovers are two and unite as a mixture or compound, then according to the science of the day, there had to be perfect balance of the four elements in a substance for it to endure (gold had this stability, for example, whereas wood did not). The speaker provides an alternative to their ‘oneness’ in which the lovers are seen as two equal elements in a compound substance: ‘or thou and I/Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die’ – in other words, their love will endure forever if it is perfectly balanced and equal.
John Dryden famously criticised Donne’s school of poetry as one which sought to ‘affect the metaphysics.’ The Good-Morrow seems a good example of this, though no metaphysical philosophy is require to understand what Donne means in claiming that two lovers are made one by their love, or that their bedroom becomes ‘everywhere’ to them.
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