John Donne

The Sun Rising

{{gap|2em}}BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
{{gap|2em}}Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch

He's insulting the sun like a servant—'saucy' means impudent, 'pedantic' means annoyingly rule-bound. The cosmic order reversed.

{{gap|2em}}Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
{{gap|2em}}Late school-boys and sour prentices,
{{gap|1em}}Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
{{gap|1em}}Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Rags of time

Hours and months are just torn scraps compared to love's timelessness. Donne's claiming lovers exist outside normal time.

{{gap|2em}}Thy beams so reverend, and strong
{{gap|2em}}Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
{{gap|2em}}If her eyes have not blinded thine,
{{gap|2em}}Look, and to-morrow late tell me,

Both th' Indias

The East Indies (spices) and West Indies (gold mines)—the entire wealth of the known world. He's saying she contains all of it.

{{gap|1em}}Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
{{gap|1em}}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."
{{gap|2em}}She's all states, and all princes I;
{{gap|2em}}Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

All honour's mimic

'Mimic' means fake performance, 'alchemy' means fake gold. Political power and wealth are just cheap imitations of their love.

{{gap|2em}}Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
{{gap|2em}}In that the world's contracted thus;
{{gap|1em}}Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
{{gap|1em}}To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

These walls thy sphere

In Ptolemaic astronomy, the sun moves in a sphere around Earth. He's flipping it—now their bedroom is the center of the universe.

This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Argument's Logic

Donne builds a three-stanza argument that gets progressively more outrageous. Stanza 1: Go away, sun, you're interrupting us—go wake up people who actually need schedules (schoolboys, apprentices, hunters). Stanza 2: Actually, you're not even that powerful—I could block you by closing my eyes, and everything you shine on is right here in this bed anyway. Stanza 3: Therefore, you should just stay here, because we ARE the world now, and warming us = warming everything.

The poem is a dramatic monologue addressed to the sun, but it's really a love poem showing off to his mistress. Every insult to the sun is a compliment to her. When he says her eyes could blind the sun, or she contains "both th' Indias," he's performing his wit for her.

CONTEXT This is an aubade—a dawn poem about lovers parting at sunrise. But Donne reverses the tradition. Normal aubades are sad (lovers must separate). Donne's lovers refuse to acknowledge the sun's authority at all. The cosmic arrogance is the point.

Metaphysical Conceits

Donne was the master of the metaphysical conceit—an extended, intellectually shocking comparison. Here he compares their bedroom to the entire universe, using the Ptolemaic model where Earth is the center and the sun moves in a crystalline sphere around it.

Watch how he literalizes the metaphor: > "She's all states, and all princes I" isn't just saying "she's my whole world." He means it geographically—she literally IS all countries, he IS all rulers. Therefore > "Nothing else is." If they contain all political reality, everything outside the bedroom becomes unreal. Kings are just actors ("Princes do but play us"), wealth is fake ("alchemy"), honor is performance ("mimic").

The final couplet completes the reversal. In Ptolemaic astronomy, the sun's sphere encompasses everything. Now > "This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere." Their bedroom is the universe's center, and the sun's entire orbit fits inside their four walls. It's cosmically absurd—which is exactly why it works as a love poem.