Romantic? Cheesy?

In class the other day, we talked about how John Donne’s poems are very different from the poems we have been reading for the past few months. First of all, Donne’s poems are one of the few poems we’ve read that uses “thee” or “thou” instead of “you”, reminding me of Shakespeare. An interesting thing someone said (this might not be exact but is something along the lines) was how Donne’s poems are a break from reading about death or the modernist’s theories on literature. His poems are about love and his lovers and seem more sincere than the other poems we’ve been reading. In my opinion, his poems are a little cheesy, especially the one called “The Good-Morrow”.

When I read this poem, I pictured the poem as a love poem some person wrote for his girlfriend or person he admired. The poem can be deemed as pretty sincere but some parts of it are over sincere that I think it becomes fake. There are a few lines that makes me to think this.

1. “I wonder…what thou and I/ Did, till we loved?” (Lines1-2)-This question is pretty easy to answer, eat and sleep of course! Those things are pretty important, so is going to the bathroom.
2. “If ever any beauty I did see,/ Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.” (Lines 6-7)-Wow your lover must be really flattered by your comment; I really hope she’s beautiful. I guess beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder.
3. “For love, all love of other sights controls” (Line 10)-if this line means that love controls what they see or if they only see each other then that’s a little scary. I would want to be able to see other things, other people.
4. “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,” (Line 15)-Your face must be really small. This reminds me of those really cheesy and fake cartoons where the character’s eyes turn into heart shapes.
5. “If our two loves be one, or, thou and I/ Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.” (Line 20-21). There’s no such thing as immortality, not unless your freeze yourself. I don’t think they had that kind of technology back then.

So my point is, if you look at parts of the poem from this point of view, the poem is a little cheesy and fake. It really seems that Donne is trying to be romantic but is failing, pretty badly. This could have been considered romantic during his time, (imagine Shakespeare with his Romeo and Juliet) but if we read it now, its cheesy.