| The Good-Morrow | |
|---|---|
| by John Donne | |
 John Donne, who wrote "The Good-Morrow" | |
| Country | Kingdom of England |
| Language | English language |
| Publication date | 1633 |
"The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets.
Written while Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn, the poem is one of his earliest works and is thematically considered to be the "first" work in Songs and Sonnets. Although referred to as a sonnet, the work does not follow the most common rhyming scheme of such works—a 14-line poem, consisting of an eight-line stanza followed by a six-line conclusion—but is instead 21 lines long, divided into three stanzas. "The Good-Morrow" is written from the point of view of an awaking lover and describes the lover's thoughts as he wakes next to his partner. The lover's musings move from discussing sensual love to spiritual love as he realises that, with spiritual love, the couple are liberated from fear and the need to seek adventure. The poem makes use of biblical and Catholic writings, indirectly referencing the legend of the Seven Sleepers and Paul the Apostle's description of divine, agapic love – two concepts with which, as a practising Catholic, Donne would have been familiar.
Donne's cartographic references in the third stanza have been the subject of much analysis, although academics have differed in their interpretation of their meaning and what the lines reference. Robert L. Sharp argues that these references can be logically interpreted as yet another reference to love; the maps with which Donne would have been familiar were not the Mercator-style maps that are common in the modern era, but instead cordiform maps, which appear in the shape of a heart and allow for the display of multiple worlds, which Donne alludes to in lines 11 to 18. Julia M. Walker, while noting that Sharp's work is "essential to an intelligent discussion of this extended image",[1] disagrees with his conclusions and argues that Donne is actually referring to a map showing one world.