My face in thine eye ....... without declining west? | The Good-Morrow By John Donne | Eureka Study Aids

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we finde two better hemispheares

Without sharpe north, without declining west?

My face in thine eye ....... without declining west? 

Reference

(i) Poem: The Good-Morrow

(ii) Poet: John Donne

Context

(i) Occurrence: Stanza 3 (Lines 15-18 / 21)

(ii) Content: This poem is considered to be one of the best poems belonging to the metaphysical school of poetry. It describes the speaker's profligate past and his present spiritual awakening. The subject is love, love seen as an intense, absolute experience, which isolates the lovers from reality and gives them a different kind of awareness; a simultaneous narrowing and widening of reality. This perfect love is immortal and it makes the lovers immortal too. 

Explanation

     In these lines the speaker of the poem talks about the unique beauty of the love which he and his beloved share. Face-to-face with his lover, the speaker sees his own face reflected in her eyes and assumes that she can see his too. It demonstrates a spiritual bond between them. Gazing into her eyes, the speaker claims that emotional honesty resides in the face. The pure love in their hearts is written in their eyes and the expression of their mouths. The speaker then puts a rhetorical question about their hearts, using a conceit to compare them to two separated hemispheres. Sure, the world has its own hemispheres, but those are an inferior product. The heart-hemispheres are perfectly designed and perfectly matched. With no cold wintry north, these hearts are full of warm southern love; and with no west, where the sun sets every day, bringing darkness to the world, they hold nothing but constancy and light. Thus the lovers world is out of this world, so it does not have the same problems as the real world has, it is utopic perfect.

Notes Prepared By: Prof. Shahbaz Asghar