I disagree with the statement that Donne’s lover is “effectively silenced.” Donne’s lover isn’t even mentioned to have said anything so how could she have been effectively silenced?
I think that at the time the poem was written society oppressed women. It was believed that women shouldn’t talk unless they were spoken to. Therefore I think it would be more accurate to say that society “effectively silenced” women not Donne.
In “The Sun Rising” Donne believes that him and his lover become the world and occupy the same position as the sun. They create an almost minature world which is more important than the larger universe within their bedroom, and everything revolves around them.
“The Sun Rising” Donne objects of the Sun’s intrusion “through windows” and “through curtains.” Windows and curtains are what separate the two lovers from the physical world.
“Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time”
“The Sun Rising” reveals the motive to engage in love within a confine place that is free from the time constraints of the physical world.
“She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is”
In “John Donne, Undone,” Thomas Docherty comments on the first line of this quote:
“Sexual relation fades into commercial relation here, and the female herself becomes mediated as a symbol of the market-place itself…”
Donne follows the seventeenth-century social standard which believes that women are inferior to men, when he claims that his lover is territory while he is the prince of that territory.
