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

Light and Sight in The Good-Morrow   John Donnes poetry shell outs with themes of creation and discovery. In his work The Good-Morrow, these issues are discussed through the work of poetic symbols. Donne gives major emphasis to the maven of sight as a way of discovering pure savour. The first stanza contains images of sleep and, more generally, the ways in which wholenesss eyes good deal be closed to the world. Donne uses phrases uniform not weaned (2), childishly (3), and dream (7), to suggest the idea that when ones eyes are closed, there is more than igniter 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 about the light which comes from being versed about the ways of the world. In this sense, to return a dream of mortal is to look at an illusion (7). This presents an interesting paradox. When talking about i ssues of blindness and sight, one necessarily assumes that some kind of light is present. Sight only(prenominal) comes into play when one is either denied vision or given the exclusive right of vision in the material world. To the speaker, a world without the presence of light has no concept of basic form. The ending 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, within 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 succeeding(prenominal) stanza. Throughout stanza two, images waking into the daylight world replace the dark images of slee... ...Through the crop of looking, the outside world can be viewed as a top manifestation of the power of true love. The opening line of this stanza reads,My face in thine eye, thine i n mine appears, (15) Giving the reader an image showing the bank note 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 unfeignedly one if by the grace of their emotions for each other, they can imagine a life together where,none can die