TheSun Rising by John Donne 1630

John Donne's "The Sun Rising" serves as a perfect example of the style of the metaphysical poets and poetry, written early in Donne's career as part of his romance oeuvre. In three 10-line verses with the rhyme scheme abbacdcdee, the poet uses figurative language (figure of speech) to personify the sun. In addition he incorporates one of his most often used themes, that an entire world may exist within a single organism, as in "The Flea," or that the union two lovers experience constitutes an entire universe. Because of the sun's omnipresence, Donne may utilize it to comment on the state of the entire world in discussing the relationship shared by the male speaker and his lover. Also typically of Donne's love poetry, the female love interest does not speak, yet remains quite obviously present during what could constitute a dramatic monologue on stage.

The speaker begins by scolding the morning sun for intruding into a happy bedroom after a night of love-making in the famous opening apostrophe,

Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

The fact that the sun must enter the bedroom by intruding through barriers that human sight cannot, the curtained windows, establishes it as the only force brazen enough to invade. Donne uses irony to make fun of lovers who believe that the sun sets and rises on their emotions; time should literally stand still in honor of their emotion, leaving them to determine their own heavenly motions and seasons. The speaker makes this plain in the next line, "Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?" Lovers should not have to cease their lovemaking in the light. In lines delightfully laced with humorous reproach, the speaker suggests other tasks for the sun as he continues,

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,

Go tell court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices.

The sun may pursue traditional duties of moving others, but not the speaker and his love. As the speaker explains, "Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time." Donne's use of a serious tone emphasizes the boundless nature of love, which cannot be measured in the units the sun is used to measure. The speaker's awareness of his own folly contributes to the reader's pleasure in knowing the address is for the benefit of the lover only. Donne establishes a natural rhythm for a voice that rises and falls with emotion by varying the meter stresses in the lines. While in each stanza lines 1, 5, and 6 are iambic tetrameter, line 2 is reduced to dimeter, and all other lines are in pentameter.

The second stanza turns on the boast by the speaker that through his emotion he can outshine the sun's beams. He brags:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong Why shouldst thou think? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long.

As with most braggarts, he must offer an excuse not to complete the impossible deed he has promised; he will not eclipse the sun with his wink, because he does not want to close even one eye and miss an opportunity to gaze at the beauty of his love. He further declares that the brightness in his lover's eyes might blind the sun, source of all light. If the sun has not yet experienced that blindness, the speaker bids him to

Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

 Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.

He equates his lover's value with that of all the spices that England had to import from India. The speaker increases his claim by noting that "those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, / And thou shalt hear, all here in one bed lay." Donne insists that love creates its own universe and yields more than all of the material wealth and royal power of the world to those who experience it. The wordplay with exact rhyme in the homonyms hear and here again emphasizes that the lover possesses an entire universe, equivalent to all the sun hears in his omniscient position, literally in the bed.

The braggadocio reaches crescendo in the third stanza, as he claims that his love "is all states, and all princes I, / Nothing else is." Not only do the two lovers represent all that is worthy, nothing else even exists outside their own universe. "Princes" simply masquerade as the lovers, and compared to them "All honour's mimic; all wealth alchemy." Finally, the speaker continues his apostrophe, "Thou sun art half as happy as we." Donne uses alliteration to his advantage, emphasizing half and happy. He could have dismissed the sun as enjoying no happiness; instead he suggests that even the sun's happiness, in his position as supreme ruler of all hemispheres, is only half that of the lovers. Donne's next line emphasizes the ability of two people to represent their own world:

in that the world's contracted thus,

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

The ultimate claim that the lovers not only are as important as the rest of the world, but are that world, allows the speaker to ease into an acceptance of the sun's presence. Thus he gracefully avoids failure in his order to the sun to depart by graciously accepting its warmth. Donne's concluding couplet acts as a blessing, not only to the poem's lovers, but to all those who enjoy such a pure emotion: "Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; / This bed thy center is, these walls, they sphere." By retaining attention to the bed throughout the poem, Donne makes clear that sex remains an integral part of love.

Analysis

“The Sunne Rising” is a 30-line poem in three stanzas, written with the poet/lover as the speaker. The meter is irregular, ranging from two to six stresses per line in no fixed pattern. The longest lines are generally at the end of the three stanzas, but Donne’s focus here is not on perfect regularity. The rhyme, however, never varies, each stanza running abbacdcdee. The poet’s tone is mocking and railing as it addresses the sun, covering an undercurrent of desperate, perhaps even obsessive love and grandiose ideas of what his lover is.

The poet personifies the sun as a “busy old fool” (line 1). He asks why it is shining in and disturbing “us” (4), who appear to be two lovers in bed. The sun is peeking through the curtains of the window of their bedroom, signaling the morning and the end of their time together. The speaker is annoyed, wishing that the day has not yet come (compare Juliet’s assurances that it is certainly not the morning, in Romeo and Juliet III.v). The poet then suggests that the sun go off and do other things rather than disturb them, such as going to tell the court huntsman that it is a day for the king to hunt, or to wake up ants, or to rush late schoolboys and apprentices to their duties. The poet wants to know why it is that “to thy motions lovers’ seasons run” (4). He imagines a world, or desires one, where the embraces of lovers are not relegated only to the night, but that lovers can make their own time as they see fit.

In the second stanza the poet continues to mock the sun, saying that its “beams so reverend and strong” are nothing compared to the power and glory of their love. He boasts that he “could eclipse and cloud them [the sunbeams] with a wink.” In a way this is true; he can cut out the sun from his view by closing his eyes. Yet, the lover doesn’t want to “lose her sight so long” as a wink would take. The poet is emphasizing that the sun has no real power over what he and his lover do, while he is the one who chooses to allow the sun in because by it he can see his lover’s beauty.

The lover then moves on to loftier claims. “If her eyes have not blinded thine” (13) implies that his beloved’s eyes are more brilliant than sunlight. This was a standard Renaissance love-poem convention (compare Shakespeare “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” in Sonnet 130) to proclaim his beloved’s loveliness. Indeed, the sun should “tell me/Whether both th’Indias of spice and mine/Be where thou lef’st them, or lie here with me.” Here, Donne lists wondrous and exotic places (the Indias are the West and East Indies, well known in Donne’s time for their spices and precious metals) and says that his mistress is all of those things: “All here in one bed lay” (20). “She’s all states, and all princes I”(21). That is, all the beautiful and sovereign things in the world, which the sun meets as it travels the world each day, are combined in his mistress.

This is a monstrous, bold comparison, a hyperbole of the highest order. As usual, such an extreme comparison leads us to see a spiritual metaphor in the poem. As strong as the sun’s light is, it pales in comparison to the spiritual light that shines from the divine and which brings man to love the divine.

The strange process of reducing the entire world to the bed of the lovers reaches its zenith in the last stanza: “In that the world’s contracted thus” (26). Indeed, the sun need not leave the room; by shining on them “thou art everywhere” (29). The final line contains a play on the Ptolemaic astronomical idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun rotating around the Earth: “This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.” Here Donne again gives ultimate universal importance to the lovers, making all the physical world around them subject to them.

This poem gives voice to the feeling of lovers that they are outside of time and that their emotions are the most important things in the world. There is something of the adolescent melodrama of first love here, which again suggests that Donne is exercising his intelligence and subtlety to make a different kind of point. While the love between himself and his lover may seem divine, metaphorically it can be true that divine love is more important than the things of this world.

The conflation of the earth into the body of his beloved is a little more difficult to understand. Donne would not be the first man who likened his female lover to a field to be sown by him, or a country to be ruled by him. Yet, if she represents the world because God loves the world, is Donne really putting himself, as the one who loves, in the position of God?

What we can say with some firmness is that the sun, which marks the passage of earthly time, is rejected as an authority. The “seasons” of lovers (with the pun on the seasons of the earth, also ruled by the sun) should not be ruled by the movements of the sun. There should be nothing above the whims and desires of lovers, as they feel, and on the spiritual level the sun is just one more creation of God; all time and physical laws are subject to God.

That the sun, of course, will not heed a man’s insults and orders is tacitly acknowledged. It will continue on its way each day, and one cannot wink it out of existence. There is nothing that the poet can do to change the movements of the sun or the coming of the day, no matter how clever his comparisons. From his perspective, the whole world is right there with him, yet he knows that his perspective is limited. This conceit of railing against the sun and denying the reality of the world outside the bedroom closes the poem with a more heartfelt (and more believable) assertion that the “bed thy center is.” It can be imagined that here he is speaking more to himself, realizing that the time he has with his lover is more important to him than anything else in his life in this moment, even while the spiritual meaning of the poem extends to the sun’s relatively weak power compared with the cosmic forces of the divine.