After reading this week’s prologue and watching the videos, I expected all of the poems to speak of death and horrible, sad thoughts. Instead, as I was reading, John Donne’s poem, “The Sun Rising” I felt a feeling of love, and not pain, as I had expected. The poem speaks of beauty and love as a cherished thing, that is awakened and interrupted by the sunlight once morning comes. These emotions can be felt through the writer’s use of personification, metaphors, and word choice.
The poem starts out with personification by saying, “Busy old fool, unruly sun/Why dost thou thus/Through windows and through curtains call on us?” These lines show that the sun is being compared to an old foolish person. I assume that the sun is an “old fool”, because it has been around forever. This literary use allows the reader to envision the sun gleaming through the windows in the morning. The poem continues by using metaphors to compare love to time and mentions that love does not have a time period, it is continuous, it is endless, not like the hours, days, seasons, and months.
In the second stanza of the poem, I initially was confused by who “her” (line 14) was referring to. I was not sure if it was referring to her as the sun or her as his lover, the one who is lying with him in bed and has also been awakened by the great, strong, beams of morning light. Then, I reread these lines, “I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,/ But that I would not lose her sight so long.” These lines prove that the speaker is saying that he could wink, and cover the light from the sun, but he does not want to close his eyes for too long, because he does not want to take them off his lover’s. The speaker of the poem, then continues to talk to the sun as a person and tells the sun to go away, and wake up someone else, someone who lives somewhere else, because right now they are just so happy lying in their bed together.
The speaker of the poem continues to use metaphors say, “She is all states, and all princes I/Nothing else is.” What the speaker is saying is that no one else compares to them. Personification returns when he says, “Thou, sun, art half as happy as we/In that the world’s contracted thus;” (lines 25-26). These lines simply mean that the sun, even though it is shining brightly, is still not as happy as the lovers are right now, because the world has created for them to meet and be together, in love.
The poem ends by saying that it is the lovers ‘duty to warm the world with love, like the world has warmed them with sunlight. Now it seems, that the lovers are appreciative of the sun, but they want the sun to know that unlike the sun, which comes up in the morning, and goes down in the evening, their love does not have a time limit. Line 30 says, “This bed thy center is, these walls they sphere.” The sun shines everywhere and is in the center of the world, just like the lovers’ bed is the center of the world, because their love is filling the world with warmth.
2 comments:
I'm focusing on what you say about the sun being an "old fool". I'm wondering, myself, if Donne means that the sun is a fool when it comes to love because it is not the moon. The moon is the light that shines on love, and since the sun is not the moon it is a fool. Does that makes sense? I'm not sure if this is what it means, so please let me know your opinion.
Kristen, I never thought of that and I could see where you are going with that. I think it is very possible that the sun could be considered a fool, because it is not the moon, since it does not shine on love.
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