The Sun Rising

"The Good-Morrow" by John Donne (1633)

This is a love poem similar to “The Sun Rising.” The speaker pays tribute to the beauty of his beloved and the quality of their love. As in the other poem, the speaker states that love “makes one little room an everywhere” and that the lovers form a complete world unto themselves. Love encompasses everything.

"To His Mistress Going to Bed" by John Donne (1669)

The title makes it clear what this poem is about. The mistress is certainly not going to bed on her own, as her lover is eager to join her. He instructs her to undress, naming each garment she is to remove (curiously, her shoes are named last). He asks her to allow his hands to roam wherever he wishes over her body and describes her in the expansive terms similar to “The Sun Rising.” She is “my America, my new found land,” and “my mine of precious stones.” To encourage her, he takes his own clothes off first and the last two lines, so to speak, seal the deal: “To teach thee, I am naked first, why then / What needst thou have more covering than a man.” (This poem was not published in the first edition of Donne’s poems in 1633; it was refused a license.)

"The Anniversary" by John Donne (1633)

This is another of Donne’s love poems presenting the love of a man and a woman in expansive terms. Like “The Sun Rising,” it contrasts time, as marked by the passage of the sun over the course of one year, with the eternity in which the lovers live. Their timeless love “hath no decay”; it “truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.”