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Overview
“The Sun Rising” is a love poem by the English poet John Donne, and it was first published in 1633
. The poem’s speaker lies in bed with his lover at dawn, when the sun pokes through the window and disturbs them. The speaker begins by hurling abuse at the sun, but as his initial irritation fades, he becomes more playful and claims his own superiority over the sun. His self-inflation eventually leads him to posit that his bedroom is a microcosm of the world, on which it’s the sun’s job to shine. The speaker’s elaborate conceit of the bedroom as a miniature world marks Donne’s poem as an example of so-called “metaphysical poetry.”Read a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “The Sun Rising.”
