The poet asks the
sun why it is shining in and disturbing him and his lover in bed. The sun
should go away and do other things rather than disturb them, like wake up ants
or rush late schoolboys to start their day. Lovers should be permitted to make
their own time as they see fit. After all, sunbeams are nothing compared to the
power of love, and everything the sun might see around the world pales in
comparison to the beloved’s beauty, which encompasses it all. The bedroom is
the whole world.
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.
Best Regards
K.K Singh
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