Light and Sight in The Good-Morrow Essay -- Good-Morrow Essays

Light and surge in The Good-Morrow   John Donnes poetry deals with themes of creation and discovery. In his prune The Good-Morrow, these issues are discussed through the use of poetic symbols. Donne gives major emphasis to the disposition of sight as a way of discovering pure love. The first stanza contains images of rest and, more generally, the ways in which ones eyes base be closed to the knowledge base. Donne uses phrases like not weaned (2), childishly (3), and hallucination (7), to suggest the idea that when ones eyes are closed, at that place is more than light-hearted that is denied from the sense of sight. In the visual example given, his resourcefulness goes beyond that which is normally associated with the absence of light. Figuratively speaking, the narrator is talking somewhat the light which comes from being knowledgeable about the ways of the world. In this sense, to confound a dream of someone is to look at an illusion (7). This presents an grac iousle paradox. When talking about issues of blindness and sight, one necessarily assumes that some kind of light is present. Sight only comes into play when one is either denied dream or given the privilege of vision in the material world. To the speaker, a world without the presence of light has no concept of basic form. The croak two lines of the first stanza deal with this issue. Those lines state,If ever any beauty I did see,/Which I desired, and got, twas but a dream of thee. (6-7) Though the speaker is in a place where there is no light, inwardly the world of the sleeping dream, shades of beauty have come to him, and he has mistook them for the true light of beauty introduced in the next stanza. Throughout stanza two, images waking into the daylight world replace the dark images of slee... ...Through the act of looking, the outside world put forward be viewed as a direct manifestation of the power of true love. The interruption line of this stanza reads,My face in thin e eye, thine in mine appears, (15) Giving the commentator an image showing the circular reflection of a face within an eye suggests the form of a world existing within the see of the speaker. The reflected image is actually a world of potential, filled with hope of love, that creates a light all its own. The last lines of the poem allude to this,If our two loves be one, or thou and I/Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die. (20-1) The speaker, and perhaps Donne himself, is given the power of deportment eternal through the love he finds in his partners eyes. Their two loves are truly one if by the grace of their emotions for for each one other, they can imagine a life together where,none can die