The Sun Rising

Question 1

Highlight some of the key concepts of the poem

Answer 1

Hyperbole, heliocentric, personification, the joyful arrogance of love, Age of Discovery, jovial, jocular.

Question 2

What is the form and what does it suggest?

Answer 2

Aubade

Ironic rejection of dawn - perhaps suggestion that night should continue to allow further sexual play.

Question 3

What does the meter suggest?

Answer 3

1st line begins trochaic and ends iambic.
2nd lines are jarringly curtailed - dimeter, abrupt.
Speaker is chiding the sun, UNTIL last 2nd line: emphatic declaration of love - frustrated, angry tone, defiant questions in 1st and 2nd stanzas.

Question 4

What is the rhyme scheme suggestive of?

Answer 4

abbacdcdee
Suggestive perhaps of harmony/concord but, especially with abrupt fragmentation of meter, also suggests frustration, or strength of emotion.

Question 5

Describe the layout

Answer 5

Caesura imparts a fractured, jerking rhythm to the poem.

Question 6

Describe the imagery of exploration and travel.

Answer 6

“both the Indias” - again hyperbolic and jovial. The sun is asked to check if Indonesia and the West Indies are still there.
“spice and mine” - wealth and pleasure, images of status.

Question 7

Describe the imagery in the first stanza.

Answer 7

Imagery of workers who should be working

Oxymoron - “saucy pedantic”. Sun dismissed in a jovial, hyperbolic way.

Question 8

Analyse the quote “nothing else is” in the last stanza.

Answer 8

“nothing else is”; sense that this coupling is the entire universe - everything else is meaningless or make-believe (“Princes do but play us”).