Explain the line from Good Morrow

Explain : I wonder,by my troth,what thou and I/ weaned till then

    The above lines occurred in John Donne's Poem “ Good Morrow”

In the first stanza, he addresses his beloved and asks her to cast her mind back to before they were lovers. What was their existence like before they met and loved each other? Were they little more than babies, like infants who are not yet weaned off their mother’s breast.

At the beginning of the Good morrow, the poet asks his beloved how they used to spend their lives before they had met each other.During those days when he was yet to discover true love, he would make up for that emptiness by indulging in other pleasures of life but now after understanding the meaning of love he realizes that those pleasures were very artificial. Now it seems to the poet as if he was a small child during those days who was being weaned on these materialistic pleasures of the world in the absence of true love which was like mother’s milk to that child. During those days all objects of beauty that he came across were nothing but her beloved’s reflection. To the poet, her beloved was like a beautiful dream which was turned into reality. It is worth mentioning that through false pleasures the poet might be indicating towards his various liaisons with other women which were just a reflection of the beauty which his true lover filled him with.

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”).    

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