PoemoftheWeek

Virgil--Thanks for pointing to the prosody of the verse. I suppose it's a bit like a rhyme royal with a Spenserian twist (sounds like some sort of chic literary cocktail), although rhyme royal would technically end bcc rather than ccc. The Spenserian twist being, of course, the alexandrine (12 sylllable) line at the end of each stanza. I've always thought this was one of the most inspired and eloquent ways of ending a line (metrically speaking that is), but then I work a fair amount with Spenser so I may be a bit biased.

It actually occured to me that two of my favorite lines in this poem happen to be these alexandrine endlines:

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If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

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and

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Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

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especially the latter, with it's trinity of "one" and the way it plays with them being at once singular individuals and two who are one and the same.
I always thought these lines attracted me purely because of the sentiments expressed, but I wonder how much the scansion of the lines really played a role in making them stand out in my mind.

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Originally Posted by The Unnamable

Look at the poem once more, remembering how it would have appeared in print in the seventeenth century.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73...fe/letters.jpg

Would anyone else agree that there is also a crude pun in the same line?

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I'm not sure I understand the image that you post. But there is sexual allusion throughout the poem: "sucked," "snorted", "slackened", "die" (in renaissance thought one died a little every time one had sex, or something like that), and of couse the two hiemisphere image is really an image of one body on top of another.

Wasn't the 'f'-like 's' only used as the first of a double letter - eg. in succefs, abbefs, etc?

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Wasn't the 'f'-like 's' only used as the first of a double letter - eg. in succefs, abbefs, etc?

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No, this wasn't necessarily the case, however I have seen some early books that do have the "f" look only for the first of a double "ss" as you describe. I'm not sure why this is so in some texts but not others, though I suspect it developed about the turn of the 17th century with some publishers slowly phasing in the modern "s" (don't quote me on this explanation however, I'll have to ask a paleographic aquaintance of mine about the history of the double ss). Also, the capital "S" is generally like our modern "s."

Anyway, I went ahead and looked on EEBO (Early English Books Online) at the 1633 edition of John Donne's poems in which "The Good Morrow" was first published, and the "s" Unnamable refers to has a definate "f" like appearance. For those wondering, EEBO is a site--unfortunately only accesible to the students and faculty of certain university libraries--which contains facsimile reproductions of nearly every book published in English between 1473 and 1700. I wanted to import a copy of the page with the poem to show--since it makes Unnamable's point pretty apparent--but there are unfortunately copyright restrictions on the reproductions, and I wouldn't want the archival police coming after me. ;) .

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(in renaissance thought one died a little every time one had sex, or something like that)

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Of course all the sexual allusions Virgil points out are quite right. Just thought I'd elaborate, that the Renaissance association of death and sex comes from le petit mort, which literally means "the little death" but is also french for orgasm. :brow:

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

Virgil--Thanks for pointing to the prosody of the verse. I suppose it's a bit like a rhyme royal with a Spenserian twist (sounds like some sort of chic literary cocktail), although rhyme royal would technically end bcc rather than ccc. The Spenserian twist being, of course, the alexandrine (12 sylllable) line at the end of each stanza. I've always thought this was one of the most inspired and eloquent ways of ending a line (metrically speaking that is), but then I work a fair amount with Spenser so I may be a bit biased.

It actually occured to me that two of my favorite lines in this poem happen to be these alexandrine endlines:

and
especially the latter, with it's trinity of "one" and the way it plays with them being at once singular individuals and two who are one and the same.
I always thought these lines attracted me purely because of the sentiments expressed, but I wonder how much the scansion of the lines really played a role in making them stand out in my mind.

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You know, I first felt that the alexandrian lines were awkward, and I just attributed to Donne's unconventional metrics. But reading it again out loud, the last line of the stanzas really nails the meaning of the stanza down, and it is because of the extra syllables. That and the triplet rhyme. It really works very well.

There are two things I can point out in "The Good-Morrow" that hasn't been discussed so far.

(1) The image of world and hemisphere that runs in the center of the poem is prominant and developed. It runs into several lines, a good portion of the poem:

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Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.

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And then in the next stanza too. It emphazies the dichotome between the large world outside the "little room" where they wake and the world they've created in this little room with their love.

(2) "Whatever dies was not mixed equally" (line 19) is a line to ponder and leads into the concluding metaphor. Norton's has an annotation on that line:

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Scholastic philosophy taught that when the elements were imperfectly ("not equally") mixed, matter was mortal and mutable; but when they were perfectly mixed, it was undying and unchanging. The dividing line between these two natures was the sphere of the moon.

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And then Donne conludes with "If our two loves be one, or thou and I/Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die." What he's saying is that despite their love making, which should be a little death, since their love is perfectly mixed, it is outside mortality and so not a death.

Yes, the world imagery is one of the highlights in this poem and, as you probably know, crops up over and over again in Donne's verse. Another of my favorite "world contracted" moments is at the end of "The Sunne Rising" which ends with him addressing the sun by saying "This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare." Donne lived in the age of exploration when expeditions were setting out to "new worlds" by sea and land, and Donne does a beautiful job of using the terms of the cartographer and the adventurer to explore the uncharted territory of personal relationships.

By chance we happened to be discussing Donne in one of my courses this week and we had a bit of a debate in class centering around the lover's chamber figured as the world. Part of the class felt that this sort of imagery is too contrived and "intellectual," rather than the sort of thing inspired by personal feelings of love. I myself have always felt very much the opposite. While it is obviously a very skillful and carefully thought out presentation of the metaphor, I feel that it was very much inspired by personal emotion. I've always thought this metaphor really beautifully and intensly encapsulates something that has crossed the mind of every pair of lovers--the desire to create an entire world unto themselves.

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And then Donne conludes with "If our two loves be one, or thou and I/Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die." What he's saying is that despite their love making, which should be a little death, since their love is perfectly mixed, it is outside mortality and so not a death.

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Very nicely put--dying and so not dying--typical Donne.

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

By chance we happened to be discussing Donne in one of my courses this week and we had a bit of a debate in class centering around the lover's chamber figured as the world. Part of the class felt that this sort of imagery is too contrived and "intellectual," rather than the sort of thing inspired by personal feelings of love. I myself have always felt very much the opposite. While it is obviously a very skillful and carefully thought out presentation of the metaphor, I feel that it was very much inspired by personal emotion. I've always thought this metaphor really beautifully and intensly encapsulates something that has crossed the mind of every pair of lovers--the desire to create an entire world unto themselves.

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I'm with you Petrarch. It is accurate. Even beyond just metaphor. I've been married 14, closer to 15 years, now and this home we've built and live in is our little world. There is almost a psychic dichotome between the outside world and this home we share.

No one has posted a poem for the week's discussion. I'll give this a bump. Someone who hasn't posted in a month can post one. I've posted already this month. Is anyone out there that wants to discuss a poem?

Before you go any further, let me say that when I wrote, “Would anyone else agree that there is also a crude pun in the same line?”, I was referring to ‘country pleasures’ in addition to ‘suck’d’.

You mean replace the s in sucked with an f? I don't know. It doesn't quite fit into the sentece. And how far back does that f- word go back? I don't have my Oxford dictionary handy.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

You mean replace the s in sucked with an f? I don't know. It doesn't quite fit into the sentece. And how far back does that f- word go back? I don't have my Oxford dictionary handy.

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Yes. What do you mean that it doesn’t quite fit into the sentence? It looks fine on my screen. What I like about Donne is that he writes the kind of love poetry that I can enjoy without having to disengage my rational faculties. He is, as I see him, honest about love. It includes sex, you know, despite what Auntie Wordsworth might have us believe. So the allusion to what it is about her that he really likes doesn’t destroy the poem for me, it adds another dimension, if you like. Besides, I was not harping on about the ‘f’, ‘s’ pun but the ‘country’ pun as in Hamlet’s ‘country matters’. Please tell me that I don’t need to send you a diagram!

Ok, I thought maybe a diagram wasn't such a bad idea given that this keeps cropping up. As I said before, I'm not able to import the image of the original text I'm working from, but I've used the seventeenth century "S" Unnamable provided to write the word as it appears in the first publication of the poem (for any concerned monitors, honestly no censoring is neccesary, this is really the way they made the "s" four hundred years ago and the way the word originally appeared).

The "F" word was very much alive during this period. The OED cites the first use as a verb in 1503, though it wasn't used as a noun until 1680 (there's your four letter word trivia for the day ;)).

As for the "country pleasures," I think you're right on Unnamable (for anyone who doesn't get this one, just say the "count" part of "country" and think of female anatomy--I don't think the site would let me write that word here). As a matter of fact I'm not the only one who agreees with you on this. I looked up the line in Hamlet you refer to, and the note to that line in the Arden 3 edition refers the reader to "The Good Morrow" as another bawdy use of the term "country."

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I'm with you Petrarch. It is accurate. Even beyond just metaphor. I've been married 14, closer to 15 years, now and this home we've built and live in is our little world. There is almost a psychic dichotome between the outside world and this home we share.

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On a totally different topic, Virgil, I just wanted to say that is incredibly sweet. It gives a single girl something to look forward to.:)

Also, I'd like to add my echo to Virgil's question: Is there anyone else out there who wants to POST A POEM?