The Sun Rising Commentary

THE SUN RISING.
by John Donne


BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

In Donne's poem "Sun Rising" he seems to ignore the conventional measures of rhyme and meter and poetic beauty. His language is direct and like a conversation instead of a typical verse, in which his verse is full of disagreement.By reading over this poem multiple times this poem cannot be read literally. Donne's placement of the outside world, in favor of the lovers' is a rhetorical technique used to argue for the strength and energy of mutual love.As the poem progresses, however, he begins to misspeak, forgetting the earlier language that he used. The poem dismantles itself through the natural contradictions of the persons rhetoric questioning, leaving the reader unconvinced that language allows love to exceed the outside world.

Throughout the poem, the speaker ridicules the sun and the authority, actually just an interruption according to the speaker; it feels it has, all the time justifying the ridicule with the greatness of love. Though in the first stanza the speaker admits that the sun does dictate some things of the earth and has certain authority, such as “chiding late school boys and sour prentices” and telling farmers and courtiers when to act, he implies that the sun has no power over love, as when he says that love is eternally the same, unaffected by time or seasons that which the sun controls.In stanza two, the speaker asks, “Thy beams, so reverend and strong / Why shouldst thou think?” . The speaker explains that he can blot out the supposed rays of the sun by winking, but he can’t because the beauty of his lover is blinding.

I personally believe that the speaker is not trying to say that love is more powerful than the sun regarding its ability to affect people; rather, he is merely pointing out that the sun has no power over love. Seemingly the mood seems to switch, He says the sun is old and so it should rest because its duty is to warm the world and since they are the world, the sun has completed its duty. Then, the poet cleverly turns the sun’s refusal to leave into a show of its generosity and by shining at them, it has centered itself upon the room of his love.