The speaker of “The Sun Rising” is a man—and presumably a young man—who grows irritated when the sun’s rays peak through his window at dawn, disturbing him and his lover. We know the speaker is male in part by convention, since love poems in Donne’s time tended to privilege male speakers. However, in the poem’s third stanza, the speaker explicitly genders himself by identifying as a union of “all princes” (line 21). To be sure, the speaker himself isn’t actually a prince. Although his class background isn’t entirely clear to us, it’s evident that his claim to nobility is a humorous act of self-inflation, linked to his conceit of his bedroom as an empire around which the whole world has “contracted” (line 26). If the speaker has a habit of self-inflation, it’s primarily due to his infatuation with his lover. The physical and emotional intimacy they share has put him in a joyfully arrogant mood, and it’s this mood that leads to his witty defiance of the sun. We might even speculate that the speaker’s lover feels amused by his playful crankiness, and that it’s her delight that spurs him to exaggerate his importance.

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