The Sun Rising - John Donne - Poetry Flashcards
‘The Sun Rising’ has a form of 3 stanzas of 10 lines following a regularity rhyme scheme. It has an uneven metrical count per line and abrupt lines. How does this form support the poems message?
The unconventional form reflects the unorthodox nature of the love. The short statements intensify the hyperbolic message.
What is the poem’s message about love?
The couple’s love transcends all thins, even the sun - the centre of the universe and the source of life and light.
Donne begins by putting down the sun and seems to speak with a superiority and arrogance.
“Busy old fool, unruly Sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?”
Donne tells the sun to leave him and his lover alone to continue loving each other in peace and tells it to go to other, less important people - treating the sun as an errand boy.
“Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide / Late schoolboys”
Donne uses romantic language to show his power over the sun and arrogantly claims he can eclipse “thy beams so reverend and strong” with a “wink”, but he won’t as he will lose sight of his love.
“I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink / But that I would not lose her sight so long.”
Puts there love on a pedestal, but at the same time gives the sense of his feeling of domination over her? <- feminist view.
“She is all states; and all princes, I: / Nothing else is”
Donne suggests their bed is the centre of the universe and that for the sun to shine it’s rays there, it will be lighting the world. This makes everything else irrelevant and eclipsed by their love.
“Shine here to us, and thou are everywhere; / This bed thy centre is , these walls thy sphere.”
