John Donne(1572–1631)

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved were we not weaned till then

But sucked on country1 pleasures, childishly

Or snorted 0 we in the Seven Sleepers' d e n ? 2snored

'Twas so; but 0 this, all pleasures fancies be.except far

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love, all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.3

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps4 to others, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one5 world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres,

Without sharp North, without declining West

Whatever dies was not mixed equally;6

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

T h e Donne poems in this anthology up through lables are fused in pronunciation and counted as

"The Relic are usually called Songs and Sonnets, one metrically. Such contractions occur only

a rubric applied to Donne's love poems in the sec- under certain phonetic conditions (e.g., when one

ond edition of his Poems (1635). There is no word ends, and the next begins, with a vowel).