The Good Morrow Flashcards
What is the metre and what does it suggest?
Mostly iambic pentameter EXCEPT for each stanza’s final (aka an alexandrine) giving them an emphatically conclusive sense of a great, loud declaration.
What is the form and what does it symbolise?
Aubade (poem set at dawn as the sun is rising, often about desire)
Symbolic of new dawn/period in life. Sense of joy and growth. Pulsing with life.
How is an alexandrine used and what does it do?
Last line of very stanza is an alexandrine (12 syllables in the line)
Drags each stanza down to a final conclusive line - draws emphasis to the extended line.
What is the rhyme scheme and what does it suggest?
ababccc
Suggests harmony, concord, connection, unity, agreement, perfection, coupling, unity, rightness.
How is enjambment used?
1st line to 2nd
Penultimate line to last
Both come after 1st person pronoun “and I”.
Analyse “weaned”, “sucked”, “childishly”, “snorted”.
Semantic field of childhood highlights how far the speaker feels he has matured since meeting his new love.
Analyse “where can we find two better hemispheres…?”
Sense of the pleasing dismissive arrogance of new love in the hyperbolic question.
Analyse “maps”, “North”, “West”, “worlds”
Extended metaphor of geography and exploration. Further explored with the repeated “let” - Anaphora , they don’t need anything else apart from each other and their own world together.
Identify a link to context
The Renaissance Neoplatonic view of relationships - in order to achieve a spiritual union, lovers must also celebrate a physical union. Thus, the physical is pathway to the spiritual. Notethatthefinal2linesofthepoemdrawtheseideastogether - a claim of immortal love, but sexual connotations in “slacken” and “die”.
