The Sunne Rising
The poem The Sunne Rising’ is a typical metaphysical poem by John Donne, a poet whose instinct compelled him to bring the whole of experience into his verse.
His genius, temperament, and learning gave to his love poems certain qualities which immediately arrested attention and have given them ever since power at once fascinating and disconcerting despite the faults of phrasing and harmony.
Donne is a poet with a unified sensibility in which both thought and feeling are simultaneously expressed through the use of Fantastic conceits, far-fetched images, unbelievable hyperboles, scholarly allusions, and colloquial rhythms.
The Sunne Rising like many other metaphysical poems begins with, an abrupt personal opening setting a scene in “Which a man address someone and speaks about his love. The poem celebrates married love and marks a new note in Elizabethan love poetry.
Donne here is colloquial, elevated, slangy, rhetorical, erudite, and familiar and he seems to have taken his language from the court and the camp, from the Jargon of the law, from the study, and from the marketplace.
Critical Appreciation of Sunne Rising
This poem illustrates the development by the rapid association of thought and the mature analytical and complex personality that characterizes metaphysical poetry at its best. Donne here emerges as the typical classic representative of the metaphysical school of poetry. In this poem, Donne’s attitude toward the sun is unconventional.
He begins the poem by calling the sun a busy old fool, a rowdy pedantic intruder acting impudently. The poet and his beloved are in their bed, and the sun seems to be a disturbance to them.
The poet says that lovers need not be guided by the dictates of the sun and they are not to be bothered by tìme or season. The poet orders the sun to go and cold late schoolboys so that they could hurry for their school.
The sun is commanded by the poet to tell the court huntsmen that the king will go for a ride. The reference is to King James I who was addicted to hunting. The poet tells the sun to call the countrymen to harvest the fields.
Love knows no season and no time and is also not concerned about hours, days, and months which are only fractions of time. In the second stanza, the poet challenges the sun by asking him why he should consider himself to be strong.
The poet could eclipse the sun with a simple wink (by closing his eyes for å moment and thereby losing sight of the sun.) But the poet hastens to add that he will not do so, as he does not want to Jose the sight of his belief even for that short a time.
The poet asks the sun if the beauty of his beloved has not blinded him, he should find out whether all the wealth and species of the Indies are where they were seen or they have not been squeezed in that bridal of his.
The poet admits that if the sun looks at the kings whom her saw yesterday he will find that all of them got their fulfillment only in such a bridal chamber. The third stanza presents an artistic sum up. The beloved of the poet represents all states and the poet himself symbolizes all princes.
According to the poet, all the princes of the world actually play the same game of love, and compared to his basic act of love, all honor is merely a mimicry and all wealth is only alchemy. The sun is only half as elated as the poet and his beloved are, and the entire world has been squeezed into that bed-chamber.
The sun has grown old and needs rest. Since the function of the sun is to give warmth to the world, that duty is fulfilled by warming the poet and his beloved. The poem ends with the poet commanding the sun to shine for the poet and his beloved. The bed is in the center.
for the sun and the walls of the bed-chamber make up its sphere of orbit. Thus the poem presents an uncommon, unconventional picture of the sun rising. The beauty of love overshadows that of such a sunrise, and the poet gives a nonstock response.
The language of the poem is dramatic, and the poet seems to carry on a powerful discourse with the sun, chiding, rebuking, and advising this object of nature. The variety of images adds grace to the poem. The Sunne Rising
The household images being ‘windows, curtains,’ natural images being sun’ geographical images “Ih” Indias” seem to have been yoked together by certain violence that is typically metaphysical. The rhythm varies, for sometimes it is Trochaic and sometimes lambic.
The lines expand and contract according to the thoughts expressed. The tone of the poem is light and humorous and the language is colloquial and simple. The Sunne Rising
Read more from Mystic Drum (click)
