Hi,
I am currently writing an essay on this poem but I am finding it really difficult to understand and get into. I know
it is a Metaphysical poem, but I have had that many different explanations of what Metaphysical is I'm getting confused!!
If you could please help me try to understand this poem in more depth I would really appreciate it!!
Many thanks,
Becky
Lexically, "meta"means forming words, denoting on a position behind or beyond. In literature the term is marked by ingenious witty imagery expressing subtleties of thoughts and emotions. John Dryden first employed the term "metaphysics"
According to Grierson, metaphysical poetry, in full sense of the term, is the poetry which has been inspired by the philosophical conception of the Universe and of the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence. In this sense, Dante's "Divine Commedia" and Goethe's "Faustause" are metaphysical poems. So are Milton's "Paradise Lost", Pope's "Essay On Man" and Tennyson's "In Memorium"
Following are the characterstics of Metaohysical poetry :-i) Concentration ii) Metaphysical Conceit iii) Learnedness iv) Mechanism of sensibility v) Unification of sensibility vi) cynicism vii) unconventional openings viii) Metrical harshness.
" The Good Morrow" celebrates the raptures of mutual love. The man and the woman are equal partners in an exchange of love. It is a poem of "we" and not "us", not about " I" and "she". The discovery of love makes all that has gone before seem trivial and unimportant. Compared to the pleasures of poet's love for his mistress, all other pleasures are mere fancies. The lovers are awake, greet each other and bid good-morrow. The lovers are clasped in each other's arms and close enough for the face of each to be reflected in the eye of the other. Each sees a hemisphere or half-world in the other's eyes for a half a world is visible to sight. The hemispheres are far different from the hemispheres of the natural world. All compounded things are liable to corruption and decay but their love being uncompounded can not bring decay.
Donne's imagery has always impressed readers by its range and variety and its avoidance of the conventionally ornamental. "The Good Morrow" refers to the familiar processesses of suckling and weaning, snoring, dreaming and waking but also to voyages, maps, and hemispheres, scholastic theories of the nature of pure substance and general philosophical speculations about our experience of space. The images in the poem are drawn from diverse fields but they are introduced not for their intrinsic fascination but for their aptness to the immediate purpose of the poem.
Donne's images are in many a new thing in English poetry, and his one of the most important innovations. Donne has a different conception of the function of imagery from that of his predecessors. The purpose of an image in Donne's poetry is to define the emotional experience by an intellectual parallel as in the line:-"And makes one little room, an everywhere".
Here the emotional identification of the lovers is brought home to us by the intellectual parallel of " an everywhere"( universe).
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