She’s all States, and all Princes I ;
Nothing else is. Princes do play us ;
compared to this, All honour’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
centre is, these walls thy sphere.
the next part Donne starts with a hyperbole which is actually
present throughout the whole stanza . In the eleventh line he refers
to the beams as being sublime or ‘reverend’ and strong. In the
following lines, the sun is being mocked at by the poetical voice; he
is questioning whether the sun is more powerful than the notion
‘love’. For him it is obvious that love will conquer the sun as he says
ironically in the next line ‘Why shoudst thou think’. In the next lines
Donne is explaining why love is stronger. He explains in line thirteen
that he can dissemble the sun in his universe by closing his eyes ‘I
could eclipse and cloud them with a wink’. This is actually impossible
in real life because even though a person closes his eyes, the sun
will still be present. But for the speaker the sun has disappeared in
his ‘imaginative’ world of love.
In line fifteen another hyperbole is being
used, the poet asks the sun whether his
love has not blinded the sun. By
exaggerating here, the author wants to
make clear that his love is very intense
and powerful. By using witty and
humorous exaggerations, Donne uses
another characteristic of metaphysical
poetry. It can even be said that Donne
goes beyond this and links it to a deeper
theme ‘the sanctity of the isolated’.
Donne is questioning the sun as to why it came out. The male
speaker complains that the sun has disturbed the lovers. He
tells the sun to go away awake others. The sun is
unimportant in comparison to the speaker’s lover. Tells the
sun to shine on the lover’s bed. Bed and walls are the centre
and walls of the universe. The form of the poem is an aubade.
Traditional poem or song lamenting the arrival of dawn to
separate the lovers. The sun rising connotes the genitals
rising. Personification of the sun assuming it to be an old fool
and unruly. The sun being portrayed as a busybody. Sun and
times are the semantic fields.
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 the Indias of spice and
mine Be where thou left’st 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.’
Almost 30 years before John Donne's birth in 1572,
Copernicus had published his revolutionary theory of
a heliocentric universe. Although it made little impact
at the time, later on, when Galileo was basing his
own astronomical research on the work of his
predecessor, the theory scandalised the Church of
Rome. In 1616, heliocentrism was officially pronounced
"false and contrary to scripture".
‘ The sun rising ’ by John Donne is a Renaissance poem. It was
published in 1633 after his death but the precise date when the poem
was written is not known. ‘The sun rising’ consists of thirty lines
which are divided into three stanzas. The poem contains two
embracing quatrains followed by a couplet. The poem is written with a
witty style and much exaggeration. Donne is known for using
imaginative writing and for being a metaphysical poet. The
characteristics of this style are; witty humour, irony, the use of
paradoxes and play with words. Themes such as love, geography and
cosmology, roman ce and man’s relationship with God, were often used
by metaphysical poets.
the first stanza gives the impression that
Donne is agitated and annoyed by the sun.
The first line starts with a personification of
the sun. Donne expresses that the sun is
disturbing ‘us’ by which he refers to two
lovers. When he continues, he asks the sun to
go away and to disturb others such as
school-boys and the huntsman. The reader
learns here that the poem will actually be a
message from the poet and his lover to the
sun in other words the theme is revealed as
a love poem.
They believe their love will not be changed by time. The sun is a huge star but is compared with an ordinary human being.
Importance of hours, days and months. His lover is the brightest star for him. Technique of hyperbole – turn bling by
looking at his lover’s brightness. She’s exotic – spicy, exciting, a princess perhaps… Indian colonies. The caesura leaves space
to think. To warm the world + shine here to us. This bed, thy center – if the sun warms them, it’ll warm the whole world.
The sun is separating them. Saying that god made him realise that he was wrong. Shutting the eye of day – in the poem
he is trying to shut the sun out – planetary divination is an important concept.
This is especially remarkable in the last part of this stanza. The lover tells the sun to go visit faraway countries such as India but the sun can also stay because the whole world lies in bed with him. He says that the sun can
ask kings but that he and his lover are so powerful that even the kings will say that they are with them in bed. In other words, the couple is the most powerful of all because everyone lives in their love world. ‘All here in one
bed lay’ , as expressed in line twenty explains this. The last part is actually ironic and witty, which characterizes the style of metaphysical poetry. The poetic voice challenges the sun by telling it to travel the world and finding
someone of great power. This is actually impossible because the lover already knows that the love between him and his lover is more powerful than anything.
Bennet (1953) describes metaphysical poetry as poetry where ‘ emotions are shaped
and expressed by logical reasoning, and both sound and picture are subservient to
this end. Words consecrated to poetry are avoided they prefer words in everyday use
they are soberly engaged in commerce or in scientific speculation’