“The Sun Rising” Summary
Hey sun, you old, disruptive busybody, why are you shining past the windows and closed
curtains to pay an uninvited visit to me and my girlfriend? Do lovers really have to structure
their schedules around your movements across the sky? You rude, inflexible, and insensitive
jerk, go scold boys who are late to school and apprentices who are sulky about their early
morning. Go tell the king's hunting party that the king is about to ride out on a hunt, and urge
lowly farm workers to start their harvesting duties. Love, in all its forms, is above the influence
of seasons and weather. It is also above the influence of hours, days, and months, which, unlike
love, wear out like old rags as time passes.
Why should you think your beams are so worshipped and strong? I could block them out by closing my
eyes, except that I wouldn't want to stop looking at my lover that long. Assuming that her eyes aren't so
bright that they've blinded yours, go check, and tomorrow evening tell me whether both the East Indies
and West Indies are where you left them, or whether they are right here next to me. Ask to see the kings
you saw yesterday, and you will hear that they are all lying here in this bed.
My lover is every country, and I am every prince. Nothing else exists. Princes only pretend to be us;
compared to our love, all honor is a cheap copy, and all wealth is a futile attempt to attain riches. You,
sun, should be half as glad as we are that the whole world fits here in the bedroom. Your old age
demands that you take it easy. Because your job is to keep the world warm, you can do your job by
keeping us warm. By shining here on us, you can shine everywhere; this bed is your center, and the
bedroom walls are the outside boundaries of the solar
“The Sun Rising” Themes
The Authority of Love
In "The Sun Rising," the speaker wants to bend the rules of the universe. Rather than allowing the sun's
"motions" across the sky to govern the way the speaker spends his time, the speaker challenges the
sun's authority and claims that love gives him (the speaker) the power to stay in bed all day with his
lover. In this way, the poem elevates the importance and power of love above work, duty, and even the
natural rhythms of the day itself.
From the start the speaker talks down to the sun, robbing it of the authority it presumes to have when it
shines "through windows, and through curtains" upon lovers in the morning. In the first line, the sun
appears as a "busy old fool" and "unruly." This language suggests that not only is the sun foolish, but
also that it ought to be "ruled" by some greater authority that it's failing to heed.
Although the speaker concedes that the sun is free to rule over "late school boys" (as well as several
other parties for whom the speaker seems to have little respect), he claims that all he would have to do
to "eclipse and cloud" the sun would be to close his eyes. The ease of this action demonstrates that the
sun is indeed "foolish" to think that its beams are "reverend and strong" in the face of a lover. By the
third stanza, the speaker is not only giving the sun orders to annoy others instead of him and his lover,
but he's also ordering the sun to actually serve the lovers by warming them in their bed. The lovers thus
become the greater authority that the sun itself ought to obey.
By asserting himself as the ruler of the sun, the speaker claims the authority to indefinitely extend the
dawn so that he can stay with his lover. The speaker asks the sun early on, "Must to thy motions lovers'
seasons run?" This rhetorical question suggests that the speaker wants lovers' "seasons" to be exempt
from the daily rhythms dictated by the rising of the sun. The speaker goes on to distinguish love as
unfamiliar with "the rags of time," suggesting that love is everlasting and therefore not subject to the
starts and stops of "hours, days, months," and other temporal units that govern the lives of "school
boys," "horsemen," and "country ants." Time, including the rising and setting sun, works differently for
lovers than for anyone else.
By the end of the poem, the speaker has "contracted" the entire world to the bed, so that the sun’s job
is to "warm" there. Whereas most people must leave their beds during the day in order to accomplish
their jobs, the speaker's insistence that love is the most important occupation anyone could have makes
the bed into a sort of daytime workplace. What's more, that workplace is so important that the sun
must drop what it is doing everywhere else in order to make the "work" of the bedroom possible.
The way the speaker reverses power in the poem doesn't simply make the sun into a servant of the
speaker: the speaker diverts the sun from everyone else, demanding that it shine only on him and his
lover. In this way, the speaker puts the rest of the world's productivity on hold. Instead of seizing the
day by jumping out of bed, he is seizing everyone else's day for himself.
Love as a Microcosm of the Universe
Like much of Donne's poetry, "The Sun Rising" uses metaphor to pack the entire world into a small
space. This technique is grounded in the idea of a "microcosm," a popular Renaissance belief that the
human body was a small-scale model of the whole universe. In the case of "The Sun Rising," the small
space is not a single body but rather the lovers' bed. The speaker claims that "to warm the world" is the
same thing as "warming us," transforming himself into a kind of king of the world and the center of the
universe. In fact, love in the poem is so grand that the universe itself exists within the relationship
between the two lovers.
The speaker uses extended metaphor not only to compare his bed to an empire but also to annex (that
is, to take in) all of the world's empires into his own bed. In so doing, he collapses the expansive world
into the space of his bedroom. In the second stanza, the speaker demands of the sun to look for "both
th' Indias of spice and mine" in the place where they were last located. (The "Indias" referenced are the
East Indies and the West Indies, both of which had been colonized by European nations by the time
Donne was writing.) The speaker goes on to claim that these peripheral sources of imperial wealth and
power now "lie here with me," meaning that they have been incorporated into the body of the speaker's
lover.
The speaker goes on to claim that the kings of the empires that extend into the East and West Indies "All
here in one bed lay." The speaker doesn't mean that the bed is literally full of kings. Rather, this line
suggests that the kings and the power they represent have all been incorporated into the body of the
speaker. As the kings conquer more nations in an effort to expand their empires, these far-ranging
empires are simply relocated to and consolidated in the lovers' bed. Because the speaker's lover is
figured as "all states" and the speaker himself is figured as "all princes," the world outside the bedroom
falls away. The speaker is able to claim that "Nothing else is," meaning that the relationship between the
two lovers is all that matters (or, that this relationship is so expansive that it contains the entire universe
within it).
The speaker's transformation of himself into the rightful heir to all the world's thrones gives him
greater sovereignty (ruling power) than any individual ruler has.
o y turning the bed into a microcosm, then, the speaker is able to inflate his own
importance so that his orders to the sun are justified rather than insubordinate (unlike
the sun, the speaker isn't "unruly").
Although the "court huntsmen" of the first stanza serve the king—who can decide whether or not to
ride on any given day—the king still must time his rides according to daylight and weather patterns. The
speaker, meanwhile, is able to assign the sun "duties" according to his will. The sun thus serves the
speaker as the court huntsmen serve the king. This impossible reordering of the universe inflates the
speaker's power past the point that any earthly prince or king's power can grow. And if the
subordination of the sun is not enough, the speaker also undermines the power of political rulers
directly in comparison to himself. He insists that he is not mimicking a prince but rather that, "Princes do
but play us." The speaker and his lover are the paragon of imperial power. Real princes only imitate the
lovers.
By "contracting" the entire world to the microcosm of the bed, the speaker asserts the authority and all-
encompassing power granted to him by love.
The speaker of "The Sun Rising" addresses the poem to the sun, but the sun is more than an annoyance
the speaker wants to banish. The sun sits at the top of the cosmological hierarchy: it controls the solar
system, and it answers, according to popular thought in Donne's day, only to God. The sun represents
immense, near divine power. And when the speaker overthrows the sun and turns it into his servant, he
is upending the entire order of the universe.
This order was conceived by the ancient Greeks as the "Great Chain of Being," and the concept was later
revived by Renaissance philosophers. It placed everything in the world, living or not, somewhere along a
chain that stretched from God all the way down to rocks. The sun was high on the chain. The
anonymous speaker would have been much lower. In his effort to switch places with the sun, the
speaker climbs up this chain, past the kings and princes thought to occupy the highest possible human
link in the chain. The speaker's intellectual joust with the sun thus tangles up the Great Chain of Being.
By the end of the poem, the speaker has eliminated every link except for himself and the sun, reforging
the chain so that he is not only the top link, but also an enormous link. By addressing the poem to the
sun, which is already very high up on the Great Chain of Being, the speaker can rise to a near godlike
position and stature in the universal hierarchy.
Empire
The speaker of "The Sun Rising" is obsessed with carving out an empire for himself. However, he refuses
to leave his bed. By comparing his lover to "th' Indias of spice and mine," then to "all states," and by
comparing himself to "all kings" and "all princes," the speaker expands his power beyond that of any
earthly ruler. An empire represents, to the speaker, an extreme position of power. Running all the
empires in the world is beyond human power.
By claiming to run all these empires within the comfort of his bed, the speaker accomplishes two things.
First, he demonstrates that he doesn't need to get up in the morning in order to work his way into a
position of power. The sun might as well let him sleep in. Second, he demonstrates that he is even more
powerful than the sun by stealing entire empires out from under its nose.
The sun, kings, and princes were all thought during the Renaissance to derive their power directly from
God. By consolidating the power of all kings and princes, and by demonstrating that he is more powerful
than the sun, the speaker becomes the most powerful being in the universe apart from God. In this way,
the speaker's conquest of all empires turns him into a Christ-like figure. He is God's "Son Rising" to
challenge the "Sun Rising" in the poem's title.
“The Sun Rising” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
Personification
The speaker personifies the sun throughout nearly the entire poem as a self-important old man in order
to rob the sun of its authority. This personification begins in the very first line, when the speaker
addresses his words to a "Busy old fool, unruly sun." The poem thus opens with the introduction of the
sun as a character with human traits. These traits are not to be looked upon favorably. In the speaker's
ageist portrayal of the sun, it is getting "unruly," meaning that it is getting worse as it ages at serving
those it is supposed to serve, but it is too "foolish" to realize its own decline.
The negative characterization of the sun remains consistent throughout the poem, so that the speaker's
proposition at the end, for the sun to confine itself to the bedroom, is founded on the assumption that,
"Thine age asks ease." Essentially, the speaker is telling the sun, "You're too old to be working so much
these days." This is a veiled insult that, on the surface, might be read as a show of care and respect for
the sun. However, the use of the familiar "thine" rather than the respectful "your" (again, in Donne's day
"you" was actually a more formal form of address than "thou") demonstrates that the speaker is talking
down to the sun rather than up to it: the uppity speaker turns himself into the sun's boss and offers it
semi-retirement if it will only consent to do his bidding. The speaker's personification of the sun as an
aging man thus allows him to invert the power dynamic between himself and the sun over the course of
the poem.
Although the speaker only explicitly describes the characteristics of the sun in lines 1 and 5, the speaker
orders the sun to take many actions, such as "go chide," "look," and "ask for." The speaker also implies
that the sun has eyes to be blinded and that it leaves colonies lying around like collectibles. By the time
the speaker tells the sun in line 25 that "Thou, sun, art half as happy as we," it seems natural that the
sun would experience a human emotion like happiness. After all, it seems to have plenty of human
agency and other human features. By turning the sun into a sentient being that thinks, acts, and feels,
the speaker sets the stage to assign the sun "duties" in line 27. If the sun wants to be a person, the
speaker seems to say, it will have to get a job like everyone else.
o
Love and Divinity
The speaker's inflation of his importance in relation to political rulers is underscored by a playfully bold
insinuation that to wake up in bed with a lover is analogous to an ascent to divine power. In other
words, waking up to your boyfriend or girlfriend can make you feel like a god.
Although the speaker never explicitly names any religious themes, the poem's preoccupation with
sovereignty (ruling power) evokes the notion of the divine right of kings. Kings in Donne's day were
traditionally thought to derive their ruling power directly from God. If the speaker becomes more
powerful than all of the world's rulers put together, he thus approaches godlike power.
On top of this implicit gesture to the divine, which Donne's readers would definitely have understood,
the speaker calls into question that idea that the sun's beams are "reverend," or worthy of being
worshipped like God. Whereas earthly kings must still kneel before the sun because it is one of the few
things God does not place in their control, the speaker manages to transform the sun into a servant that
kneels before him. The speaker thus becomes more "reverend" than the sun.
The poem's title furthermore likens the speaker to Christ upon his resurrection. Although the sun is
explicitly the one who is "rising" according to the title, the entire poem is a meditation on the speaker's
imperative to rise from bed. Because of this double "rising," and because the speaker positions himself
as the one the sun must worship as kings worship the sun, the speaker might be said to be a second
"sun rising ." Read aloud, as this poem was meant to be, the title contains a double entendre: "sun
rising" also sounds like "son rising." The phrase "son rising" naturally evokes the rising or resurrection of
Christ, the son of God. The speaker's thwarting of natural laws over the course of the poem is similar to
Christ's thwarting of death via crucifixion. This similarity supports the notion that when the speaker
wakes up in bed with his lover, he is experiencing a kind of divine resurrection that vests him with new
Christlike sovereignty over kings, time, and nature.
The speaker's near-heretical claim to divine power is built upon his relationship with his lover. Only by
likening her body to all the world's empires is the speaker able to assert himself as this Christlike figure
who is exempt from the natural laws to which emperors must defer. Love, sex, and religion are
intertwined in much of Donne's poetry. In this poem, love and sex are not only as powerful as religious
devotion. Furthermore, love and sex forge an incredible intimacy between the lover and God. To lie in
bed with a lover is not to refuse God. On the contrary, it is to rise as God's son.
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Sun Rising”
o Lines 1-3
The first three lines of "The Sun Rising" establish the relationship and tension among the three entities
of the poem: the speaker, his lover, and the sun. The speaker disparagingly personifies the sun as a
"busy old fool" who is "unruly" in the face of some authority. That authority is revealed at the end of line
three to be "us," the speaker and an unknown party (later revealed to be his lover), who together relish
the peaceful darkness of a curtained room.
Note the speaker's use of "thou" to address the sun. "Thee" and "thou" are not simply old-timey or high-
brow ways to say "you." In Donne's day, common English distinguished between familiar and formal
forms of the singular "you." "Thou" was an appropriate address for family members, close friends,
inferiors, or younger people. "You" was actually more formal and polite, and it would have been the
proper address for someone deserving of respect or reverence. By calling the sun "thou," especially
when the more obviously intimate relationship at hand is that between the speaker and his lover rather
than the speaker and the sun, the speaker insinuates that the sun is an inferior being who owes the
speaker respect and obedience. By shining through the windows and curtains, the sun is being unruly
and rude not to some unspecified authority, but directly to the speaker and his lover.
The two main poetic devices at play in these lines further serve to elevate the speaker's power over the
sun. The speaker uses apostrophe to ask a rhetorical question of an entity, the sun, who can't respond.
When the speaker demands to know why the sun insists on shining through the curtains, he is
uninterested in an actual justification. Instead, the speaker wants to convince the sun not to "call on"
the lovers to get out of bed by claiming that to do so is "unruly." Because the question (and indeed, the
whole poem) is addressed to an inanimate entity (the sun), the speaker does not bear the same risk that
other rhetorical questioners may face. That is, the sun has no chance of responding dismissively or
returning a counter question. Through the combination of apostrophe and a rhetorical questioning, the
speaker thus creates a platform for himself to lecture the sun at length, with no insubordinate
interruptions.
Q:how does john donne satires contemporary courtly poem of love of the poem Sunrising
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.