The imagery in John Donne’s “The Good Morrow” was very interesting to me. In particular the last stanza caught my attention, in which the speaker compares the eye of his lover and his own eye to the hemispheres in which the sun rises and sets:  “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears. . . Where can we find two better hemispheres.” Sometimes I find that love poetry seems, to me, a bit trite and I easily read the emotion as almost a bit superficial. However, this image gave a sense of both the passage of time, and possibly a great deal of time. This idea of time passing is also supported by previous portion of the poem in which the speaker references the childhood he and the subject shared. The idea of the eyes as hemispheres also makes the scale of the stage on which this scene is set seem very large and helps to break any sense of pettiness that might have otherwise been attributed.

                The organization of George Herbert’s first two poems also caught my eye. While the other poems in today’s selection appeared fairly dense and block-like on the page, these two were tapered in the center of their stanzas giving them an odd hour-glass like appearance. Upon closer inspection of these poems it appeared that the way in which they were structured reflected a transition within the poem. Both poems were religious in subject matter. The long lines previous to the taper seemed to be written from a position of repentance, the lines after the taper seemed to reflect some sort of redemption, and the lines that tapered acted as a transition between the two. The shortening of the lines in the middle of “The Altar” along with the couplet rhymes within this poem made the poem seem sing-song or nursery rhyme like. However, this effect was not mirrored in “Easter Wings.”