Life Cycle through Love
"Love as desire for the perpetual possession of the good" - Plato
Plato’s theory of love has been discussed as the basis for many poems through the years dating until today. The Good Morrow, by John Donne, describes a man and his lady as two parts of a whole, thus importing Platonic love. Furthermore, Donne designs the poem to be a song that is sung by lovers to describe their feelings towards each other. Through this metaphysical poem, Donne chooses to acknowledge his argument of carpe diem through the ideas of the structure, figurative language, and his tone.
The Good Morrow has a varied structure comparable to other poems. It has been split up into three stanzas. The first stanza shows the lover, Donne, reject his life until he finds a woman whom he falls in love with. He describes his past life as, “’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee” (5-8). His past loves shouldn’t be taken so seriously because he wasn’t wholly aware of himself back then. In comparison, the second stanza provides a celebration of joy, since he has found his new love. In this stanza, Donne says that the room he is in makes him satisfied and it forms his new world. Donne also describes that the outer world is rejected through the discoveries back around his time. The third stanza reiterates the sincerity of both lovers. “If our two love be one, or thou and I Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die” (21-22). The perfect love between these lovers is immortal, and also makes the lovers immortal.
John Donne begins his poem by using a number of exploding questions proposed to a mysterious lady who he loves. The last question arose through an allusion "Or snorted we in the seven sleepers den" (4). This question proposes an allusion back to a legend of seven Christian children who hid in a cave and slept there for about 200 years, waking up to find...