Summary
Lying in bed with his lover, the speaker chides the rising
sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and asking why it must bother
them through windows and curtains. Love is not subject to season
or to time, he says, and he admonishes the sun—the “Saucy pedantic
wretch”—to go and bother late schoolboys and sour apprentices, to
tell the court-huntsmen that the King will ride, and to call the
country ants to their harvesting.
Why should the sun think that his beams are strong? The
speaker says that he could eclipse them simply by closing his eyes,
except that he does not want to lose sight of his beloved for even
an instant. He asks the sun—if the sun’s eyes have not been blinded
by his lover’s eyes—to tell him by late tomorrow whether the treasures
of India are in the same place they occupied yesterday or if they
are now in bed with the speaker. He says that if the sun asks about
the kings he shined on yesterday, he will learn that they all lie
in bed with the speaker.
The speaker explains this claim by saying that his beloved
is like every country in the world, and he is like every king; nothing
else is real. Princes simply play at having countries; compared
to what he has, all honor is mimicry and all wealth is alchemy.
The sun, the speaker says, is half as happy as he and his lover
are, for the fact that the world is contracted into their bed makes
the sun’s job much easier—in its old age, it desires ease, and now
all it has to do is shine on their bed and it shines on the whole
world. “This bed thy centre is,” the speaker tells the sun, “these
walls, thy sphere.”
Form
The three regular stanzas of “The Sun Rising” are each
ten lines long and follow a line-stress pattern of 4255445555—lines
one, five, and six are metered in iambic tetrameter, line two is
in dimeter, and lines three, four, and seven through ten are in
pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACDCDEE.
Commentary
One of Donne’s most charming and successful metaphysical
love poems, “The Sun Rising” is built around a few hyperbolic assertions—first,
that the sun is conscious and has the watchful personality of an
old busybody; second, that love, as the speaker puts it, “no season
knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags
of time”; third, that the speaker’s love affair is so important
to the universe that kings and princes simply copy it, that the
world is literally contained within their bedroom. Of course, each
of these assertions simply describes figuratively a state of feeling—to
the wakeful lover, the rising sun does seem like an intruder, irrelevant
to the operations of love; to the man in love, the bedroom can seem
to enclose all the matters in the world. The inspiration of this
poem is to pretend that each of these subjective states of feeling
is an objective truth.
Accordingly, Donne endows his speaker with language implying
that what goes on in his head is primary over the world outside
it; for instance, in the second stanza, the speaker tells the sun
that it is not so powerful, since the speaker can cause an eclipse
simply by closing his eyes. This kind of heedless, joyful arrogance
is perfectly tuned to the consciousness of a new lover, and the
speaker appropriately claims to have all the world’s riches in his
bed (India, he says, is not where the sun left it; it is in bed
with him). The speaker captures the essence of his feeling in the
final stanza, when, after taking pity on the sun and deciding to
ease the burdens of his old age, he declares “Shine here to us,
and thou art everywhere.”
