John Donne's The Good Morrow uses wonderful diction, word choice, to highlight the he was just drifting through life until he met his true love. We see this play out in all three stanzas, and overall it creates the tone of being lost and walking with a blindfold until love open his eyes to the world. This word choice leads to the eventual poetic voice which he uses to show his desire for love, and how his life really inst a life until he has met his love.
The Good Morrow narrates Donne's feelings towards love, and of love for his significant other. I personally think that it does so in a very round about way that befuddles the reader, but that is just my personal opinion. Diction plays a very large part in The Good Morrow, and it creates the overall meaning of the poem like pieces of a puzzle. In the first stanza we see hsi diction showing the meaninglessness of his life until he found love with " i wonder, by my troth, what thou and i did, till we loved?" he is wondering what his life consisted of and what meaning his life had before he found his love, showing that life without love is not life at all. Another instance in the first stanza of diction reinforcing the theme of this poem is near the bottom when he says that any beauty he saw prior to his love was just a dream of her, his lover.
The second stanza further underlines the theme of being lost when with out love with all the references to discoveries and maps. He discovered what life was like when he discovered love. the sentence "let maps to others, world on worlds have shown..." this says that he discovered a true life, a new world, with the help of a map, and that without that map he had nos sense of direction.
Finally, in the third stanza, the references to the hemispheres further brings to light how he was not complete and his life had no meaning without love. He was one hemisphere and his lover, his partner, was the other hemisphere, creating a complete, new world.
The Good Morrow speaks to Donne's romantic side, and also his philosophical nature. This unravels to the reader through the diction of the poem, which illuminates that in life we are ever moving, ever discovering, but we only begin to understand and respect the gift of life when we are given the gift of love. Donne has received love, and as such he has seen the difference between a life with and without love.
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1 comment:
Woah Woah Woah Ro-Dawg....this is deep. I really commend you on your word choice and fluidity...it was like a river goin downstream.
Anyhoo, this commentary is seriously well written. I like the way that you combined diction and tone, brcause it wasn't like you were always addressing them separately, because you actually showed how they are intertwined in this poem and how the words contribute to both. However, some words I would say are pretty riskay.....befuddles.....meaninglessness... You also mentioned theme...nice touch. I completely love how you explained the whole "maps and discoveries" part, because you really focus on the effect and break it down.
Nice job.
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