When analyzing a work by John Donne it is important to remember that Donne was undoubtedly one of the most influential poets of his time. It is crucial that readers are aware that Donne's use of complex metaphors and imagery was revolutionary, and that it takes great attention to detail to put the pieces of his poems together. This is especially true in his poem “The Good Tomorrow.” In this poem, the speaker explains to his lover the nature of their relationship. The speaker uses the first half of the poem to set the stage for the long, detailed image in the second half of the poem, at which point he uses a globe as a representation of the love the two of them share. of geographical images in this context emphasizes the duality of human nature in the unity of romantic love. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay More specifically, the images show that the unity between the lovers in the poem is both physical and spiritual. The first stanza of the poem introduces the physical aspect of the love shared between the speaker and his beloved. The speaker says to his beloved: “Have we not been weaned until then? / But did they suck the pleasures of the countryside, childishly?”[1] It is with these two rhetorical questions posed by the speaker that the necessity of the physical body in their love is established. The speaker then goes on to confirm that the answer to both questions is yes. What the speaker is implying is that before forming their loving unity, they only pursued physical, and more specifically sexual, love, because that was all they had known. The jokes also suggest that the two have already performed acts of physical love with each other through the use of sexual innuendo such as "sucked by the pleasures of the country". In the conclusion of the first stanza the speaker says, “If ever I saw any beauty, / That I desired and obtained, it was but a dream of yours.” it is a physical act or state of being. The object of the speaker's sleep or id is to dream, and more specifically to dream of his lover. What the speaker is saying in these lines is that anyone he met or had sexual relations with before her did not constitute a true unit and therefore only served as a way to lead him to her. The implication of this statement made by the speaker is that it was the physical characteristics of human nature, be it immature sexual intercourse or the fact that he was “asleep” before meeting her, that led him to his beloved. The spiritual aspect of the lovers' unity is briefly touched upon at the end of the first stanza before being explored more deeply in the second stanza. I had previously discussed the last two lines of the first stanza in which Donne provides images of dreams, which are a consequence of sleep. While the act of sleeping can be seen as something physical, the act of dreaming has more of a spiritual innuendo. The speaker is saying that while the physical part of the body sleeps (presumably after indulging in sexual pleasures) the speaker's spirit longs for a connection with the lover. In the opening line of the second stanza the speaker says, “And now good morning to our waking souls, / That look not to each other for fear; / For love, all love for other looks controls, / And makes a little room an everywhere.”[3] The speaker begins by implying that he is no longer dreaming of his beloved, for now they are awake and their souls they are united. In this case, the spiritual connection of lovers is represented by their souls. After introducing the spiritual element with souls, the speaker goes on to highlight the difference between physical love and spiritual love. In the first stanza we see thatin physical love there is an experience of pleasure followed by sleep. However, when two souls are united in love, there is absence of fear and the outside world becomes irrelevant to them. The room the two of them are in (in this case the bedroom they woke up in) is the only world that matters because that's where their souls come together. By saying that once their souls connect, they are free from fear and the rest of the world becomes obsolete, the speaker places great significance on the spiritual nature of their relationship in the unity of lovers. After describing the importance of the physical nature of lovers and the spiritual nature of lovers, the speaker goes on to discuss how these two ideas are connected in the last part of the poem. At the beginning of the third stanza, the speaker says that "My face in your eyes, yours in mine appears, / And true simple hearts rest in the faces." the spiritual saying that their faces are reflected in each other's eyes, which is the window to their soul where they can see each other's hearts. G. R. Wilson, Jr. says, in reference to lines 15 and 16, that “Each lover has two manifestations – himself and the self reflected in the eyes of the other lover – and therefore each has both a physical existence and an ideal existence , or shadow. ”[5] Wilson does a great job of portraying the dichotomy of the image that Donne provides, however I disagree with the way he concludes his statement. While I agree that the speaker's manifestation represents the physical side of the image, I would argue that the speaker's reflection in her lover's eyes is meant to represent a spiritual side of the image. I believe this represents a spiritual side of the image because it seems to be directly related to the previous line where the speaker says, "We own a world, everyone has one and is one." saying that each of them is a world for the other to explore and together they form a world. This world is in reference to the previous lines where the speaker discusses the conception of one as a result of the union of their two souls. Therefore, when the speaker and his beloved look into each other's eyes, they explore the world described in the second stanza, which is composed of the lovers' bodies and souls and consequently displays both physical and spiritual components. Taking it a step further, Wilson cites the work of Arnold Stein by saying, “In his elaborate explanation of this poem, Stein points out that 'where the lover sees directly his own face reflected, while he sees the other face directly, but only feels his image reflected in his eyes, there is the most delicate point of contrast between the subjective and the objective.'”[7] What Stein seems to suggest is that the image of the lover reflected in the speaker's eyes is not something that he could ever perceive. So how would he know the image is there? While the idea of being able to see his lover represents his physical manifestation, the reflection of his lover in his eyes seems to take on her spiritual manifestation because although he cannot see his reflection, he knows it is there as a result of the connection of their souls . . At the end of the final stanza the speaker mentions another example that involves the connectivity between the physical and the spiritual. The speaker says, “That which dies, has not been mixed equally; / If our two loves were one, or, you and I / Love so alike, that no one should grow weak, no one should die.”[8] Here the speaker explains that for a love to be eternal the constructs of that love must be balanced, otherwise love will die sooner or later. As the arguments previously stated in this article suggest, the components that constitute love for Donne in this poem are the physical and spiritual aspects of human nature. Therefore, lines 19 to 20 suggest that both the physical and the.
tags