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

Light and Sight in The Good-Morrow   John Donnes poetry deals with themes of creation and discovery. In his work The Good-Morrow, these issues are discussed through the use of poetic symbols. Donne gives major emphasis to the sense of sight as a way of discovering pure love. The first stanza contains images of sleep and, more gener everyy, the ways in which superstars middleball jakes be closed to the world. Donne uses phrases like not weaned (2), childishly (3), and dream (7), to suggest the idea that when ones eyes are closed, in that respect is more than waking that is denied from the sense of sight. In the visual example given, his imagery goes beyond that which is normally associated with the absence of light. Figuratively speaking, the narrator is talking some the light which comes from being knowledgeable about the ways of the world. In this sense, to have a dream of someone is to look at an illusion (7). This presents an interesting paradox. When talking abou t 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 vision or given the franchise of vision in the material world. To the speaker, a world without the presence of light has no concept of basic form. The last two lines of the first stanza deal with this issue. Those lines state,If perpetually 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, inside 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 can be viewed as a direct manifestation of the power of true love. The spring line of this stanza reads,My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, (15) Giving th e reader an image showing the circular reflection of a face within an eye suggests the form of a world existing within the gaze 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 life eternal through the love he finds in his partners eyes. Their two loves are truly one if by the grace of their emotions for each other, they can imagine a life together where,none can die