The Sun Rising

The poem is playful in tone, full of hyperbole (exaggeration) and wit, but with the serious purpose of extolling the vastness, timelessness, and beauty of love between of a couple. Stanza 1 contains a sharp contrast between the rhythms of time and the lovers’ sense of eternity. At the beginning, the speaker adopts a posture unlike what one might expect. Instead of worshipping or otherwise honoring and saluting the sun, he mocks and humbles it as an “old fool” (Line 1) insisting on going where it is not wanted. Far from being pleased with the coming of dawn and the new day, the speaker is irritated by it; he regards the sun as a nuisance. In Lines 2 and 3, he has the temerity to ask the sun why it is projecting its rays through the curtains of his bedroom where he sleeps with his lover.

Line 4, “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” hints at one of the themes of the poem: Lovers exist in an eternal present and are not subject to the passage of time that is marked by the movement of the sun across the sky. This movement is, of course, from the human perspective only, but it is the perspective taken in the poem, in all three stanzas. The Copernican Revolution of the 16th century, named after the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, described the sun as the center of the universe, around which the other planets, including the earth, revolved. In the Ptolemaic system, which it replaced, the earth was the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it. During Donne’s time, the Copernican system was become widely accepted, although the Catholic Church still regarded it as a heresy. Donne was aware of the Copernican system by 1611 at the latest, since he wrote in An Anatomy of the World that “the new philosophy calls all in doubt.”

In Line 5, the poet keeps up his good-humored mockery of the sun by calling it a “[s]aucy pedantic wretch.” By “pedantic,” he may mean that the sun rigidly adheres to its own schedule regardless of whether it is wanted or needed. The speaker suggests there are other people the sun might better disturb in the early morning, including “court huntsmen” (Line 7). King James I was known to be an enthusiastic hunter of stags, and the court huntsmen were courtiers who made sure they rode with the king in order to receive his favor. The reference to “country ants” (Line 8) as another set of people the sun should disturb rather than the lovers may be an allusion to Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper. In the tale, the ant works hard to store up food for the winter, as will the “country ants” here when the sun gets them moving in the morning and they work at harvest time. Lines 9 and 10 change tack, bringing out the contrast first suggested in Line 4. In contrast to the rhythms dictated by the movement of the sun, lovers live in their own timeless world.

The mockery of the sun continues in Stanza 2. The sun may think its beams are strong, but in fact, the speaker has the power to obliterate them whenever he chooses “with a wink” (Line 13), although that is a power he chooses not to exert, since he does not want to block out the sight of his lover. In Line 15, he wittily plays with the common poetic conceit (found in the sonnets of Petrarch, for example, and many others), that the eyes of the mistress are like the sun. The speaker here goes one better: The eyes of his lover, he states, outshine even the sun, and he facetiously tells the sun that if it has not been “blinded” (Line 15) by their radiance it should be able to see that his lady embodies all the riches, treasures, and beauty of both the East and West Indies. To verify this, the sun can take a look the very next day, the speaker says, on its passage over both locations. The poet metaphorically suggests that the sun may find those riches are no longer there; they are now embodied in the poet’s beloved. He means that she is setting a new standard for riches. The same applies to all the kings of the earth that the sun may have shone upon the day before. All the kings, the speaker implies, are embodied in this one bed he shares with his lover.

Stanza 3 continues this line of thinking. The lovers embody all countries and all princes. Nothing else exists but these two; they are a world unto themselves (Lines 21-22). Compared to what they possess in each other, nothing else has any real value. The word “alchemy” in Line 24, when applied to wealth means fraudulent. In Line 25, the poet softens his tone in addressing the sun once again. This time, instead of berating it, he acknowledges its vital role in warming the world as he continues the metaphor of the lovers as the entirety of existence. The principal task of the sun, then, is to warm the lovers--to instill in them the vigor of life. Their bed, Line 30 explains, becomes the center of the sun’s activity (as the earth was thought to be in the Ptolemaic system), and the walls of the bedroom will be the sun’s “sphere,” that is, the very boundaries of its orbit.