The Good Morrow Translation and Analysis PDF

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Análisis del poema Good Morrow...

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The Good-Morrow (from The Songs & Sonets1) ABABCCC I won/der by /my troth2, /what thou, / and I Did, till / we lov’d? / Were we / not wean’d3 / till then? alliteration, rhetorical question But suck’d / on coun/try plea/sures4, chil/dishly?5 rhetorical question Or snor/ted6 we / i’the se/ven slee/pers’7 den? alliteration , assonance (x2) T’was so; / But this, / all plea/sures fan/cies8 be.9 If e/ver a/ny beau/ty I / did see, assonance 10 Which I / desir’d, / and got, / ’twas but / a dream / of thee.11 partial assonance + assonance And now / good mor/row12 to / our wa/king souls, Which watch / not one / ano/ther out / of fear; alliteration, assonance For love, / all love / of o/ther sights / controls13, anaphora, assonance And makes / one lit/tle room, / an e/very where.14 Let sea/-disco/v’rers to / new worlds / have gone, Let Maps / to o/ther, worlds / on worlds15 / have shown, anaphora Let us / possess / one world; / each hath / one, and / is one.16 My face / in thine / eye, thine / in mine / appears, And true / plain17 hearts / do in / the fa/ces rest, Where can / we find / two bet/ter he/mispheres Without / sharp18 North, / without / decli/ning West19?20 What e/ver dies, /was not /mixed e/qually;21 If our / two loves / be one, / or, thou / and I 1

that’s how he spelt it, though we spell it ‘sonnets’ by my troth – (archaic) truly 3 to wean – destetar 4 country pleasures – aristocratic children we sent into the country to be wetnursed; ‘country’ also implies sexual, in a debased animalistic sense (with a pun on ‘cunt’) 5 the suggestion in lines 2 and 3 is that they have now passed together from the clumsy and immature sexual experiences of their past, into a more sophisticated and adult awareness. 6 snorted – snored 7 seven sleepers – seven legendary young Christians from Ephesus were persecuted by Decius (249AD), but they survived being walled up alive by sleeping for 187 years, waking up when Christianity was the officially-accepted religion. 8 fancies – products of the imagination 9 all other pleasures except this of their love aere mere fancies, lacking reality 10 dream – i.e. something forgettable that cannot be compared to ‘the real thing’ 11 the other lovers he had had were only shadows or images of the reality he now finds completely expressed in her 12 good morrow – good morning (the lovers are waking up in bed together) 13 true love removes the restless desire to see other people and places and to experiment sexually 14 cf. The Sun Rising 15 worlds on worlds – charts of the heavens 16 let us possess our world of mutual love; you are the world to me, as I am the world to you 17 plain – honest, undisguised 18 sharp – cold 19 declining West – the west where the sun sets heralding night (representing the gradual decline of love) 20 Donne knows full well that a sphere with only an east (rising sun) and south (balmy Tropics) is impossible 2

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an allusion to Aristotle’s theory that heavenly bodies are eternal and unchanging while sublunary matter is composed of elements in endless changing combinations and warfare. Sublunary matter cannot reach stability because it is not ‘mixed equally’. Donne applies this as a metaphor of eternal love in lines 20-21. If the total love which is formed with the love of each of the members of the couple is in perfect poise, that love will be a perfect body, a heavenly being, and it will never die. If love can never cease, it means that the couple will go on living and loving each other forever.

Love so / alike, / that none / do slac/ken22, none / can die23.

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to slacken – a. become less passionate, b. avoid sex, c. lose one’s erection yet another allusion to le petit mort

The Subject This dramatic monologue is believed to be one of Donne’s earliest poems. This poem parodies and subverts the alba24 (a.k.a. aubade25, Tagelied or ‘dawn song’, a poetic form dating from the 12th Century in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part. - the famous bed scene in Romeo and Juliet is another version. An earlier example can be found in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Conceit: The two lovers wake up into a new world created by their love. Both lovers have loved before it would be dishonest to ignore the past and indecent to dwell on it unduly The extremes of passion are reflected in the cascade of rhetorical questions and the heavy use of hyperbole. Love is an intense, absolute experience, which isolates the lovers from reality giving them a different kind of awareness; a simultaneous narrowing and widening of reality. Love apparently conquers space and time. - It makes the past disappear and creates an eternal moment. - It annuls wanderlust and creates a world in the space of the bedroom. However, love is vulnerable to time and change and The Good Morrow never quite escapes from the fear bred of this vulnerability. Even if the poetic voice is sincere, is this the myopic sincerity of the ‘honeymoon’ phase of a relationship?

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in Provençal in French

Stanza 1 The poem is divided in three stanzas: - In the first one the lover rejects the life he led until he met his present love. He has had many lovers before but now recognizes that this woman is ‘the real thing’. He describes his previous life as childish and unconscious, a kind of sleep. His past loves must not be considered as serious, since he was not completely aware of himself at the time. However, we ask: has he given this spiel before? Stanza 2 The second stanza is, in contrast, a celebration of the present. Each soul has ‘awakened’ to the other, and has discovered a whole world in it. The union is self-sufficient and self-contained. Consequently, the outer world is rejected, under the symbols of maps and discoverers. Up to now, the poet has cut off his superfluous experience: - past time (the first stanza), - external space (2nd stanza). The focus is on ‘the here and now’. Stanza 3 !Eres mi media nananja! - The third stanza shows the perfect sincerity and adequation of both lovers, and it adds a hope for the future to that assertion of the present we have met in the first stanza. This perfect love is not only immortal: it makes the lovers immortal, too: If our two love be one, or thou and I Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die. Conclusion Love as a nearly mystical experience which defies mutability. It is interesting to compare the last and most important metaphor of the poem to these lines of A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: Dull sublunary lovers love (Whose soule is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. The allusion is the same and is used in much the same way. It is not difficult to understand why Donne was termed a metaphysical poet. The impression of totality, of closeness and of rejection of the outer world that the poem conveys finds here its perfect expression, although it can be found in other poems by Donne, such as The Sun Rising, whose last three lines run thus (the poet is also in a room with his lover, addressing the sun): . . . since thy duties be To warm the world, that's done in warming us, Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy centre is; these walls, thy sphere.

Formal Analysis Donne calls this a sonnet, but we wouldn’t. - he is using the term simply to mean love poem. This stanza form is not traditional: it may have been invented by Donne. The decasyllables are used in the sonnet, - but Donne adds a 12-syllable line at the end which gives a nice and nearly imperceptible variety to the scheme and rounds off the stanza. Rhyme Problems It is worth noting that some of the rhymes have changed sound since the 17th Century: - ‘one’ (line 14) does no longer rhyme with ‘gone’ (line 12) or ‘shown’ (line 13). - The rhymes ‘childishly’/‘I’ and ‘equally’/‘die’/‘I’ are now imperfect ones. Although the rhyme in /ai/ resumed at the end of the poem makes Donne repeat one rhyming word, ‘I’ (1ines 1 and 20), the two instances are far apart and this is not a major defect in the rhyme-scheme. Donne was never too careful with this kind of harmony - in Ben Jonson’s words, “for not keeping of accent, he deserved hanging”. Donne would not subordinate the idea to the rhythm. Whether this is a vice or a virtue is a matter of opinion.

TRANSLATION: El Saludo de los Buenos Días Read through this student’s translation complaring it to the English version – what would you improve? 1 Me pregunto, por mi fe, ¿qúe hicimos tú y yo 2 antes de enamoramos? ¿no nos habíamos destetado antes, 3 sino que seguíamos mamando infantilmente de los placeres de la tierra? 4 ¿o roncábamos en la cueva de los siete durmientes? 5 Así fue. Excepto este, todos los placeres son fantasías. 6 Cada vez que yo veía algo bello 7 que yo deseaba, y lo conseguía, era como si soñara contigo. 8 Y ahora, demos el saludo de los buenos días a nuestras almas expectantes, 9 porque no nos contemplamos el uno al otro con temor. 10 El amor controla todos los otros deseos 11 y hace de cada pequeño sitio un todo. 12 Dejemos que los descubridores de los mares se vayan a nuevos mundos, 13 dejemos que les muestren los mapas y los mundos a otros: 14 tengamos nosotros nuestro mundo: cada uno tiene el suyo, y es uno. 15 Mi cara en tus ojos, y la tuya en los míos se refleja, 16 y los corazones sinceros en las caras descansan. 17 ¿Dónde podríamos encontrar dos mejores hemisferios, 18 sin el agudo Norte, sin el ocaso del Oeste? 19 Aquello que muere es porque no fue equilibradamente mezclado. 20 Si nuestros dos amores son uno solo, o tú o yo 21 nos amamos tanto que ninguno es menos que el otro, ninguno puede morir....