And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

These lines come from John Donne’s early love lyric “The Good-Morrow,” generally dated to the 1590s and first published posthumously in the 1633 edition of Poems. Donne wrote in a period of intense English interest in exploration and cartography; the poem alludes to “sea-discoverers” and the proliferation of maps as Europe imagined “new worlds.” Set as an intimate morning-after meditation between lovers, the speaker contrasts youthful, half-conscious pleasures with a new, awakened mutual love that feels complete in itself—so complete that it rivals the era’s grand outward voyages of discovery.

Donne frames mature love as a kind of spiritual awakening: the lovers’ “waking souls” no longer keep watch out of insecurity or fear, because love governs what they see and how they inhabit space. The metaphysical conceit turns a private bedroom into a cosmos—“one little room, an everywhere”—suggesting that true intimacy collapses distance and renders external novelty unnecessary. The references to explorers and maps sharpen the claim: while the world chases expansion and new territories, the lovers “possess one world” in each other, achieving wholeness and unity. Love becomes both epistemology (how they know) and geography (where they are).