The first four lines of “The Good-Morrow” establish the poem’s broad concerns and hint at its unusual form. The speaker begins by asking a series of questions, directed at his or her lover. The speaker wants to know what the two lovers did before they fell in love. These questions are rhetorical in that the speaker isn’t actually interested in the lover’s response. In fact, the speaker has already made up his or her mind. Before they met each other, their pleasures were “childish.” The speaker characterizes these early, childish pleasures in a variety of ways: they were like babies, still nursing (and therefore “not weaned”). Or they were only interested in unsophisticated “country pleasures”—potentially an obscene pun on a word for women's genitalia . Finally, the speaker alludes to an important tradition in Christianity and Islam: the myth of the seven sleepers, a group of young people who hid in a cave for 300 years to escape religious persecution. The speaker and the lover were thus like pious Christians; now that they've woken up, they are rewarded for their piety with a new life. This allusion sets up the poem's core argument that erotic love can have effects that are just as profound as the effects of religious practice.
Because the poem encourages the reader to imagine that the speaker is directly addressing his or her lover, the poem takes on the qualities of apostrophe in these lines: speaker talks to the lover, but the lover is unable to respond to the speaker or contest the speaker's account of their relationship. This establishes a pattern that will continue throughout of the speaker monopolizing the poem's descriptions of love.
These lines look like a fairly standard stanza of English poetry: they are in iambic pentameter and rhymed in a criss-cross pattern, ABAB. This is a widely used stanza form in English, but there are some details that are slightly askew. For instance, the speaker uses a slant rhyme in lines 1 and 3, “I” and “childishly.” As the poem progresses, there will be several such instances of formal sloppiness, such as loose meter and imperfect rhymes. The speaker’s attention is evidently focused elsewhere. Indeed, the speaker seems to pay closer attention to sound inside the lines. The first two lines of the poem contain an almost overwhelming quantity of alliteration, assonance, and consonance, on /w/, /l/, /o/, and /ee/ sounds. The speaker’s enthusiasm and joy come through in the poem’s play of sound.
If this play of sound seems exuberant, even out of control, the speaker asserts control in other, subtler ways. Though the first line of the poem is enjambed, the next three are end-stopped, establishing a pattern that will persist through the poem. Overall, the poem is mostly end-stopped. The speaker is exuberant, but he or she is nonetheless able to carefully calibrate his or her thoughts to the length of the poem's lines.