Three of the poems we are reading for today are examples of Donne's poetry of requited, mutual love; each of the speakers is a man who has entered into a relationship with a woman and finds himself sexually, emotionally, and spiritually fulfilled.  The fourth is one of Donne's few poems featuring a female persona, and she is less content with the way her love relationship is going.

Information and Questions:

I.  "The Good Morrow," "The Sun Rising," and "Break of Day"
1.  A favorite genre of love poem in the Medieval and Renaissance periods is an adaptation of a form used in classical Roman
literature: the dawn song, called alba in Latin and aubade in Provençal.  The alba usually laments the coming of day when lovers must part.  The need to part is often (though not always) linked to the illicit nature of the relationship. These three poems might be considered variations on the dawn song.  How do Donne's speakers feel about the coming of the morning in these poems?  How does the dramatic context of lovers waking up in the morning after a night together affect the tone of these poems in various ways?  How does the imagery reflect that dramatic context?  How does the gender of the speaker affect the way he or she perceives and responds to day's arrival?

2.  17th-century writers often explore the idea that each individual human being is a microcosm, a little world or mini cosmos that mirrors on a small scale the balanced structure of the macrocosm (the physical universe).  According to Renaissance physiology, the human body contains four humors or vital substances: black bile (or "melancholy"), blood, yellow bile (or "choler"), and phlegm. These four humors of the "microcosm" correspond to the four elements of the "macrocosm": earth, air, fire, and water;  and each humor or element combines two of four basic qualities: hot, cold, moist, and dry.

Humor of the Bodily Microcosm                Element of the Macrocosm                      Qualities of the Humors and Elements

In the macrocosm, chaos is prevented by the orderly division of the elements: storms and natural disasters result when the elements are thrown out of balance.  In the microcosm of the human body, if all four humors are in balance with one another, the body, mind, and emotions are healthy; but if one humor predominates, the imbalance can be problematic. A disproportionate amount of choler makes one "choleric"--easily angered, rash, bold, excitable; too much phlegm makes one "phlegmatic"--lazy, flaccid, unmotivated and cowardly; a predominance of blood makes one "sanguine" (from the French "sang," blood)--extremely cheerful, irrepressible, optimistic. But the most often-discussed imbalance, classified by Renaissance thinkers as a disease, was the excess of black bile, which makes one melancholic"-- overly analytical, pensive, morbid, and sorrowful.
How does Donne rework and apply the idea of the microcosm in "The Good Morrow"?

3.  Readers often point out the allusion to Renaissance voyages of discovery and to astronomical charts of the heavens in "The Good Morrow."  What is the speaker's attitude toward those who "to new worlds have gone" and toward those who study maps of the heavens?

4.  Why the conditional ending (If . . . or . . . [then] . . . ) to "The Good-Morrow"?

5.  How does the speaker of "The Good-Morrow" compare with the speaker of "The Sun Rising"?  What kind of utterance is each making?  And how does that utterance bear witness to love in each case?

6.  An enjambment is a line break in the middle of a syntactic unit (at a point that is not a natural pause).  Watch for the great enjambment at the beginning of stanza 2 in "The Sun Rising."    How does it work?

7.  How do the speakers of these poems use the interrogative? the imperative?

8.  How do the references to light in stanzas 1-2 of "Break of Day" work?  How does the speaker attempt to manipulate the idea of light to her own advantage?

II.  "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
1.  What is the tenor of the simile in the opening stanzas of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"?  The vehicle is an image of
virtuous men dying quietly, parting with their souls so peacefully that their friends can't tell exactly when the moment of death
occurs.  But the poem is not about death; what is its occasion?  What is the tenor of the simile?

2.  How does the idea of the microcosm come into play in this poem?

3.  In the last four stanzas of "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," the speaker tries to console his beloved with two different
similes, two different ways of describing their love.  Why does he need two?  How does each simile console?  Is the image of
gold in any way related to the image of a compass drawing a perfect circle?

4.  "A Valediction" has exactly 36 lines; how does this number add to the poem's meaning?