Elements of Plato in John Donne's The Good Morrow

Elements of Plato in John Donne's The Good Morrow

There are clear Platonic elements in Donne's "The Good Morrow." The idea that Donne and his lady are halves that complete each other is traceable to Plato's theory of love. Lines 7 and 8 of the poem refer to the Platonic World of Ideas: the lady is presented as the Idea of Beauty, of which all earthly beauty is but an imperfect reflection. My argument, however, is that Plato's cave allegory and his World of Ideas are integral to a full understanding of this highly complex poem.

The first reference to the Platonic cave comes in line 4 of the poem: "Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?" The seven sleepers are seven young Christians who were walled up in a cave in the year 249. Miraculously, they did not die but slept for 187 years. This miracle of early Christianity is negatively presented by Donne and the plight of the seven "snorters" may have a relationship to Plato's cave: there are fundamental similarities between Plato's cave-dwellers on the one hand, and the seven Christians (and the biblical myth of Exodus, for that matter) on the other hand, according to Downing. In both cases, there is a God who cares for the people involved, even though they are unaware of this fact; in the first case because they are asleep, in the second because they mistake shadows of shadows for reality. They are both trapped in a cave from which they apparently cannot escape. And they both dwell in darkness. In a poet of Donne's complexity, it is not far-fetched to argue that line 4 refers both to the seven Christians and to Plato's cave-dwellers, and that Donne wished us to read it in precisely this way. Such an argument is reinforced by the fact that the line is immediately followed by...

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...a Platonic Idea is, of course, a paradox, as the World of Ideas is not only deathless but supposedly has existed since the beginning of time.)

Alternatively, one can argue that Donne (or his poetic voice) experiences a transient relationship in this poem that may or may not develop into a Platonic Idea. Like Plato's cave-dwellers who came out into the light, however, he has learned a great deal and become capable, as a consequence, of achieving the Platonic Idea of sexual love in a possibly new, deathless encounter that is "mixed equally."

WORKS CITED

Donne, John. "The Good Morrow." The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. Frank Kermode and John Hollander. New York: Oxford UP, 1974. 1024-25.

Downing, Christopher. "How Can We Hope and Not Dream? Exodus as Metaphor: A Study of the Biblical Imagination." Journal of Religion 48 (1968): 35-53.