FYUP 1ST SEMESTER
ENGLISH MAJOR/ MINOR
UNIT 2 – POETRY
“The Sun Rising” by John Donne
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.”
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 imitate 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
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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.”
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.
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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. By 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
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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.
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 beloved 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
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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.
Symbols
The Sun
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
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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.