Analysis of The Sun Rising

In the following text I will discuss the poem “The Sun Rising”, written by John Donne, probably after 1603.

Since from the title an intelligent reader expects the poem to be about a dawn, which is a typical metaphor for rebirth and life, usually referred to the cyclic time.

However, you have to remember you are reading a metaphysical poem, whose symbols, named conceits, are unusual and hard-to-understand: probably your image of the Sun rising is not the same as the poet.

Indeed, Sun is presented by the lyrical I as an “unruly, busy, old fool” (l.1), who annoys lovers.

The first stanza, made by 10 lines, presents the key theme of the poem, which is the relationship between Time and Humans. Despite most of them need time in their life or even they measure their life with time (l. 5 to 8), someone (the lover) is bothered by time: Love is a power which cannot deal with “the rags of time” (l. 10); it escapes from Time, it is eternal.

The second stanza reinforces the conceit expressed above.

The lover (in the poem, the speaking voice) can “eclipse and cloud the Sun'' (l. 13), can “blind” it (l. 15), so it is stronger than solar beams: you can say that the lover's time is higher than the sun's one.

The stanza also provides a second image: the bed at the centre of the Universe, with clear references to the Copernican system, which instead identified the Sun as the centre.

This conceit goes on also in the third and last stanza, in the ending line: “this bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere”.

The language used refers to the new discoveries too: verbs like “to eclipse”, “to cloud”, “to blind”, “to warm” and nouns like “beams”, “alchemy”, “centre”, “sphere” are all connected to the scientific language. However, the tone is informal and easy to read and follows the guidelines of the metaphysical poetry: in particular the Sun is addressed as a “unruly fool”, common epithets for people  but unusual for poems. There are also many words linked to Time and his “rags”: “season”, “hours”, “days”, “months”, “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, “age”, … 

In lines 9-10, is easy to notice the “mess” of the sections of the time: the common pattern requires a climax, but Donne prefers a chaotic solution to underline the “smallness” and the uselessness of time compared to Love.

Donne uses several references in addition to the scientific ones: you can notice for example the particular structure of the word “to-morrow”, the same of the famous Macbeth’s soliloquy about life, time and death. They both express the emptiness of life without feelings. Macbeth is “supped with horrors” and “nothing cannot start” him, so that he describes life simply as a “tale [...] full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”; Donne shows that only love (Shakespeare considers Art too) and, for extension, feelings, can overcame Time, which makes everything idle.

Donne magnifies Love, like previously courteous love sonneteers did; however while during the Middle Ages poets simply idealised it, Donne raises it at the level of Time and God.

At the end I would like to express my opinion after the analysis. 

Although the poem discusses a common theme, Donne gave it a new structure, a new sound, which captured and amused me from the first to the last line. I surely had a new point of view about Love, though I disagree with some points of the poem: Love is not perfect, is connoted also by struggles and difficulties and that is why it is wonderful.