As with so many love poems, “The Good-Morrow” opens with a rhetorical question posed to the (absent) lover. In this case the question is: what did we do, what were our lives like, before we found each other?
The first stanza is dedicated to answering this question, by means of a series of metaphors and similes meant to convey a sense of dormancy, innocence, and illusion. The second, middle, stanza is where the titular “good morrow” appears. Here the speaker describes how the arrival of their love has transformed his life and his experience of the world. In the next and final stanza, he looks toward the future and argues for the enduring, even immortal quality of their love.
