wealthy doctor, ensuring that the family remained comfortable; as a result, despite being the son of an ironmonger and portraying himself in his early poetry as an outsider, Donne refused to accept that he was anything other than a gentleman. After study at Hart Hall, Oxford, Donne's private education eventually saw him study at Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court, where he occupied his time with history, poetry, theology and "Humane learning and languages". It was at Lincoln's Inn that Donne first began writing poetry, looking upon it as "a life-sign or minor irritation" rather than something which defined him. This early poetry included "The Good-Morrow" as well as many other works which later went on to comprise his collection Songs and Sonnets, published in 1633, two years after his death; "The Good-Morrow" is considered, in terms of its theme and maturity, to be the first of this collection's poems. Sonnets are, canonically, poems of 14 lines with assorted rhyming schemes. Originating in the 14th century works of Petrarch, the most common form of the sonnet is known as the Italian Sonnet: a stanza of eight lines in which the writer lays out a complex thought, followed by a pause and a six-line conclusion "which is characteristically both unpredictable and intense". This was interlinked with the idea of courtly love, in which the goal of a romance is not simply passion, but a more significant moral perfection. "The Good-Morrow", although identified by Donne as a sonnet, does not follow this structural layout, although it does follow the thematic one; Donne used "sonnet" simply to refer to any piece of love poetry, ignoring the fact that "The Good-Morrow" was a 21-line work divided into three stanzas. Poem The poem opens with a reference to a Catholic legend as Donne says: This refers to the Seven Sleepers, the Catholic legend of seven Christian children, persecuted for their faith during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius, who fled to the shelter of a cave where they slept for more than 200 years. Donne, one of six or seven children and a baptised Catholic during a time of strong anti-Catholic sentiment from both the populace and the government, would certainly have been familiar with the story. In this passage, the speaker experiences a sense of wonder, having awoken in bed with his lover; he makes the discovery that their love makes