Although we don’t know exactly when John Donne wrote “The Sun Rising,” it was first published in the posthumous 1633 volume Songs and Sonnets. Like many other works in that volume, “The Sun Rising” is a love poem that features Donne’s distinctive interest in situating physical expressions of love in a cosmic—and hence spiritual—framework. The speaker of this poem is a man who lies in bed with his lover at dawn. As the sun begins to shine through the windows, the speaker retaliates by hurling abuse and invective at this implicitly personified celestial body. The speaker’s initial irritation leads him to claim his superiority over the sun. At once inflating his own ego and asserting the primacy of love over everything else, the speaker comes to imagine his bedroom as a microcosm of the world. As the undisputed ruler of this world, the speaker wants to rewrite the rules of the universe. In his version of the cosmos, for instance, love eclipses the physical laws of nature. Donne does his own rewriting of rules in this poem, cheekily transforming the sonnet form into his unusual ten-line stanza structure, with its variable meter and unique rhyme scheme.

Take a Study Break