The Sun Rising_ Johnn Donne

JOHN DONNE

 

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
        Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices,
    Go tell court huntsmen that the King will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

        Thy beams, so reverend and strong
        Why shoulds't thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
        If her eyes have not blinded thine,
        Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
    Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
    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.'

        She's all states, and all princes, I;
        Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
        In that the world's contracted thus;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here, to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

About The Poem

Almost 30 years before John Donne's birth in 1572, Copernicus had published his revolutionary theory of a heliocentric universe. Although it made little impact at the time, later on, when Galileo was basing his own astronomical research on the work of his predecessor, the theory scandalised the Church of Rome. In 1616, heliocentrism was officially pronounced "false and contrary to scripture".
Donne must have been well aware of these developments when he wrote "The Sun Rising", this week's poem. Perhaps they are even reflected in that little unexpected epithet, "unruly" – suggesting the sun himself had challenged the Roman inquisition. The unimpressed invocation, "Busy old fool, unruly Sun", sets the scene for Donne's own lyrical revisionism. While plenty of other poets before him had ranked the sun secondary to their mistresses' eyes, Donne is far more original. He creates his own erotic cosmology, and
places himself and his lover at the centre. Metaphorically, in fact, he restores the medieval concept of the heavens, in which the Earth rules supreme (though this Earth is far from static: this Earth moves).
"The Sun Rising" must be one of the most joyous love poems ever written. It interrogates the troubadour genre, the "Alba" or dawn song, in which the lovers lament their obligation to separate at daybreak. Donne's speaker greets the sunrise undismayed. Right away, he establishes a teasing, boastful tone. He's talking to the sun man-to-man, you might say, except he's a marvellously cocky youth and the sun is a fussy old dotard. The "rising" the poem advertises is not, in fact, primarily the sun's: it is the firing and blazing of male sexual energy. Go and bother ordinary working folk, the poet seems to say; we're not getting up. Love rules, OK?
The story is emotionally richer than that, of course. As it progresses, the thought does not merely "rise" but orbits outwards, away from self-centred desire: the building sense of relationship is reflected in the pronouns "I" and "she", which join as "we" in the last stanza. The poem finally basks in the mutuality of the lovers' exaltation.
But first the pitch of good-humoured braggadocio must be raised. The second stanza has an ocular theme. The lover declares he could eclipse the sun with a mere wink – and would do so, if only that moment of losing sight of his beloved would not have lasted longer than he could bear. The sun's own eyes are at risk of being blinded by a look from the speaker's mistress – Apollo to Cupid's victim in an eyelash flutter. Whatever glories "he" may see from his elevated position, nothing could be comparable to the view of the magnificent "Indias" embodied by the lovers.
That the beloved is "all states" suggests a possible pun: she is not merely all the rich countries of the Earth, but she is in transports of amorous feeling. It's now, in the final stanza, that the excitement seems to spill over and expand into a new mood of generosity. Even the sun is forgiven; at least, he's offered early retirement. He may now simply revolve around the lovers' bedroom, with the consolation that he is still shining on the world – since they are the world. Lucky old sun.
A sublime yet jokey impudence imbues the poem. The diction is that of the vigorous dialogue so characteristic of Donne, whether he is addressing his mistress in the earlier poems, or God in the later work. But there is also a maturity and breadth of vision. The bed curtains remain open. Donne recreates the teeming life around the lovers, placing them both, if by default, in ordinary time, with his references to schoolboys, apprentices, courtiers and farm-workers, and in a wider geography of exotic exports and foreign kings. These hints of "scenery" are like windows in the hyperbole: they are glimpses of reality.
The performance may be erotically boastful, but it is heartfelt. The poem's design has an impressive simplicity. Its rhetorical tropes are never so complex that they distract us with fancy intellectual footwork This earthiest of dawn songs glows, in fact, with the warm, straightforward, life-giving energy of that unruly sun.


Source: theguardian.com