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Analysis of Donne's "The Sun Rising"

The speaker chides the rising sun for disturbing him and his lover as they lie in bed. He tells the sun that love is timeless and asks it to bother others instead, like schoolboys or workers. The speaker says his love for his partner eclipses the sun's beams, and that if the sun looks it will see that all the treasures of the world, like those of India or kings, now lie with him and his lover in bed. He explains that his lover is his world, making their bed the center of the universe. The poem has three stanzas following an intricate rhyme scheme and meter. It is a charming metaphysical love poem where the speaker pretends his subjective feelings of love are

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Tasnim Azam Moumi
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200 views1 page

Analysis of Donne's "The Sun Rising"

The speaker chides the rising sun for disturbing him and his lover as they lie in bed. He tells the sun that love is timeless and asks it to bother others instead, like schoolboys or workers. The speaker says his love for his partner eclipses the sun's beams, and that if the sun looks it will see that all the treasures of the world, like those of India or kings, now lie with him and his lover in bed. He explains that his lover is his world, making their bed the center of the universe. The poem has three stanzas following an intricate rhyme scheme and meter. It is a charming metaphysical love poem where the speaker pretends his subjective feelings of love are

Uploaded by

Tasnim Azam Moumi
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
  • The Sun Rising

“The Sun Rising”

Summary

Lying in bed with his lover, the speaker chides the rising sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and asking why it
must bother them through windows and curtains. Love is not subject to season or to time, he says, and he
admonishes the sun—the “Saucy pedantic wretch”—to go and bother late schoolboys and sour apprentices, to
tell the court-huntsmen that the King will ride, and to call the country ants to their harvesting.

Why should the sun think that his beams are strong? The speaker says that he could eclipse them simply by
closing his eyes, except that he does not want to lose sight of his beloved for even an instant. He asks the sun—
if the sun’s eyes have not been blinded by his lover’s eyes—to tell him by late tomorrow whether the treasures
of India are in the same place they occupied yesterday or if they are now in bed with the speaker. He says that if
the sun asks about the kings he shined on yesterday, he will learn that they all lie in bed with the speaker.

The speaker explains this claim by saying that his beloved is like every country in the world, and he is like
every king; nothing else is real. Princes simply play at having countries; compared to what he has, all honor is
mimicry and all wealth is alchemy. The sun, the speaker says, is half as happy as he and his lover are, for the
fact that the world is contracted into their bed makes the sun’s job much easier—in its old age, it desires ease,
and now all it has to do is shine on their bed and it shines on the whole world. “This bed thy centre is,” the
speaker tells the sun, “these walls, thy sphere.”

Form

The three regular stanzas of “The Sun Rising” are each ten lines long and follow a line-stress pattern of
4255445555—lines one, five, and six are metered in iambic tetrameter, line two is in dimeter, and lines three,
four, and seven through ten are in pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACDCDEE.

Commentary

One of Donne’s most charming and successful metaphysical love poems, “The Sun Rising” is built around a
few hyperbolic assertions—first, that the sun is conscious and has the watchful personality of an old busybody;
second, that love, as the speaker puts it, “no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the
rags of time”; third, that the speaker’s love affair is so important to the universe that kings and princes simply
copy it, that the world is literally contained within their bedroom. Of course, each of these assertions simply
describes figuratively a state of feeling—to the wakeful lover, the rising sun does seem like an intruder,
irrelevant to the operations of love; to the man in love, the bedroom can seem to enclose all the matters in the
world. The inspiration of this poem is to pretend that each of these subjective states of feeling is an objective
truth.

Accordingly, Donne endows his speaker with language implying that what goes on in his head is primary over
the world outside it; for instance, in the second stanza, the speaker tells the sun that it is not so powerful, since
the speaker can cause an eclipse simply by closing his eyes. This kind of heedless, joyful arrogance is perfectly
tuned to the consciousness of a new lover, and the speaker appropriately claims to have all the world’s riches in
his bed (India, he says, is not where the sun left it; it is in bed with him). The speaker captures the essence of his
feeling in the final stanza, when, after taking pity on the sun and deciding to ease the burdens of his old age, he
declares “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.”

“The Sun Rising” Summary Lying in bed with his lover, the speaker chides the rising sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and as

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