John Donne
‘The Sunne Rising’
Like ‘The Good Morrow,’ this poem is meant to convey the immensity of the love that exists between the poet and his beloved; however, also like in ‘The Good Morrow’ Donne wants to elaborate upon the same conceit he used previously, the microcosm of the lovers’ world encapsulating the macrocosm of the entire globe. This poem is different from the previous poem, however, in that it takes a much more jocular tone and approach to the subject matter, personifying and addressing the Sun as a tiresome personage who attempts, vainly, to disrupt the lovers’ embrace.
The elaboration of the poem’s main conceit begins in verse one when the poet protests to the sun ‘Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?’ The poet goes on to answer his own question, declaring ‘Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,/Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.’ In other words, the poet is stating that love is impervious to temporal decay or climactic change; it stands above the sublunary world of change and decline. In verse two, the poet goes on to explain why this is so; it is so because lovers are greater than the sun and the time which he imposes upon the world. The poet has the power to ‘eclipse and cloud’ the sun’s beams; equally, his mistress’s eyes have the power to ‘[blind]’ the sun itself. Lest the sun doubt the greatness of these puny humans, the poet goes on to tell the sun that both East and West Indies, ‘th’ Indias of spice and mine’ lie not upon the globe, where the sun ‘left’st them’ but ‘lie here’ with the poet in his bed; equally, ‘those kings whom [the sun] saw’st yesterday’ are not dispersed about the world but ‘here in one bed lay.’ In short, the poet declares in verse three, ‘She’s all states, and all princes I;/Nothing else is.’ What appears to be the real world outside the lovers’ bed is but a phantasm compared to their love, as princes in that word are but actors who ‘but play us,’ honour in that world is but a mime or ‘mimic’ and wealth in that world is but the acquisition of fool’s gold, ‘alchemy.’ In short, the poet is informing the sun that the whole globe is contained within the lovers’ bed – everything outside that is just a mere copy. Finally, however, the poet takes pity upon the sun, who has clearly been living in a world of delusion for a long time. He says ‘In that the world’s contracted thus,’ reduced to the size of one bed in one room, the aged sun need no longer worry about warming the physical globe; instead, since ‘This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere,’ the sun need only worry about warming the room the two lovers lie in, ‘Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.’ Thus the argument of the poem consists in the elaboration of this one conceit: that the love between the lover and his mistress is so great that it becomes the entire world, beside which the external world pales and fades; given that this is so, the sun can halt its celestial movement and simply light and warm the bed the lovers lie in since in warming that he warms the whole globe.
