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John Donne's 'The Sun Rising': A Literary Analysis of Love, Power, and Divinity, Study Guides, Projects, Research of English

English

"The Sun Rising" is a poem written by the English poet John Donne. Donne wrote a wide range of social satire, sermons, holy sonnets, elegies, and love poems ...

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2021/2022

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The Sun Rising
J OHN D ON NE
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
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;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
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.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
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The Sun Rising

JOHN DO NNE

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys and sour prentices,

Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

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;

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She's all states, and all princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

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.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

"The Sun Rising" is a poem written by the English poet John Donne. Donne wrote a wide range of social satire, sermons, holy sonnets , elegies , and love poems throughout his lifetime, and he is perhaps best known for the similarities between his erotic poetry and his religious poetry. Much of his work, including "The Sun Rising," was published after his death in the 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. In "The Sun Rising," the speaker orders the sun to warm his bed so that he and his lover can stay there all day instead of getting up to go to work. The poem's playful use of language and extended metaphor exemplifies Donne's style across his work, erotic and religious alike. “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 system.

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. 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 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 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.