The Sun Rising Flashcards
‘The Sun Rising’,
an aubade apostrophe, is designed to undermine the power of the sun, through Donne’s assertion that love is in fact the ultimate global power.
Donne undermines the sun’s power,
demoting it beneath his relationship through solar and microcosmic imagery. Initially, he uses a derogatory tone in the caricature of the sun, depicting it a ‘busy old fool, unruly’ and a ‘saucy pedantic wretch’. This imagery is anthropomorphic – structurally, he immediately Donne demotes the celestial power of the sun to that of mankind. He pairs the adjectives ‘fool’ and ‘pedantic’ to demean the dependability of the sun’s cycle as arbitrary and useless, with a condescending tone, asserting an image of himself as superior.
This imagery continues in the pair
‘unruly’ and ‘saucy’ - Donne adopts a didactic and disciplinary tone that reasserts his perceived superiority to the sun, with the ironic tone of the braggadocio in its ‘reverend and strong’ ‘beams’. Donne’s final patronising assertion of the sun is that it is ‘half as happy’ as him – the numerical image and reiterated personification with the diminishment in the joyful connotations of ‘happy’ are a final damning image of the sun.
Moreover, his use of microcosmic imagery
aids the images of his own superiority, as the ‘world’s contracted’, ‘this bed’ becomes the ‘centre’ of the Sun’s world. The shrinking connotations of ‘contracted’ juxtapose the cosmological imagery – all of the sun’s immense power can be summed up in form through a single rhyming couplet, and through imagery in a single room. As such, Donne’s solar and microcosmic imagery undermine the sun’s power.
Donne suggests the transcendental power of love
through metaphysical and ocular imagery. In the first stanza, Donne capitalises ‘Love’, promoting into the abstract; a metaphysical force which transcends tangible power. He uses repeated negatives: ‘no season […], nor clime, nor hours, days, months’ with natural imagery in ‘season’, geographical imagery in ‘climb’ and even the other metaphysical concept of time in the tricolon ‘hours, days months’ to illustrate everything that ‘Love’ is more powerful than, exemplified by the asyndetic syntax and caesura.
Furthermore, he uses ocular imagery
with the first-person declaration: ‘I could eclipse […] them with them a wink’. The implied corporeal image of ‘wink’, with its facetious connotations, juxtaposes the grandiose cosmological image of an ‘eclipse’, a suggestion that the metaphysical power of Donne’s ‘Love’ allows him to overcome the Sun with the slightest effort. Mirroring this is the power of the lover’s eyes, which can ‘blind’ the sun; notably, the image of ‘blind[ing]’ has connotations of punishment – perhaps Donne is attempting to admonish the hubris of the Sun by even attempting to ‘call on’ them and disturb their love. As such, the ocular imagery highlights the abstract power of love.
Donne asserts the superiority of his relationship,
and of love, as the ultimate global power through monarchical and wealth imagery. In ‘Both the’Indias of spice and mine’ there is cartographic imagery, depicting the span of his lover’s (and therefore Love’s) power, but also imagery of opulence, indicating the rewards that this power reaps. Notably, it might be perceived that these are also images of the Empire, Donne’s territorial objectification of his lover, but more significantly, his claim over the concept of Love itself. This is structurally reiterated in the zeugmatic assertion: ‘she’s all states, and all princes I’; despite the powerfully ultimate connotations of ‘all’, the caesura separates the figurative ‘states’ that the woman is emblematic of, and the ‘princes’ (others of whom notably ‘play’ them, with its imagery of pretence), who rule over her. Perhaps Donne is arrogantly asserting his patriarchal control over his lover, and therefore of the concept of Love itself.
Repeating the opulent imagery
and hyperbolic ‘all’ is: ‘all honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy’, following the motif images of veneer in the verb ‘mimic’ and ‘alchemy’, the derisive tone a suggestion that ‘wealth’ and social power are only a duplicitous attempt at gaining the real power of ‘Love’, but they have no real value.
Ultimately, Donne subverts the power of the Sun
as inferior to the abstract and global power of Love, through juxtapositions between cosmological and microcosmic imagery, as well as the metaphysical, corporeal and cartographic.
