Summary

The Sun Rising is a love poem set in the speaker's bedroom, where he and his lover lay in bed
presumably after a night of passion. The sun is seen as an unwanted dawn intruder, invading
the couple's space, and is initially insulted before being challenged.
Donne wrote many an amorous poem in his younger days, using the extended metaphor or
conceit to explore in depth the relationship between himself, the cosmos and love. Poems such
as The Flea and To His Mistress Going to Bed are particularly popular.
Because of his interest in love, religion and morals and inventive use of form and intellectual
prowess, he is often known as the father of the metaphysical poets.
Later on in life he devoted himself to religion, eventually becoming dean at St Paul's cathedral
in London. His Holy Sonnets and other religious verse are a counterbalance to his more erotic
writings.
John Donne's poems were first collected and published in 1633, two years after he died. No
copies of his handwritten poems survive but manuscripts were circulated during his life, passing
amongst friends and other admirers.
The Sun Rising is one such poem. It begins with a rush of blood, a blunt telling off, as if the
speaker's space and style has been cramped. He is annoyed. To allay the self-induced tension
the speaker soon begins to compare himself with the sun, belittling the power of that mighty
star, declaring love the master of all.
In the end the lovers and, more importantly, the bed in the room, become the focal point of the
cosmos, around which everything revolves, even the unruly sun.

Analysis 1

First Stanza
Lines 1-4
This poem begins with insults. The sun is called an old fool, which is quite controversial because
we're talking about the giant star that keeps everyone and everything alive on the planet, right?
The sun can never be unruly, surely? Donne personifies the sun in order to have a go at it. The
speaker is saying : Get out of my life! Love is not under your control!!
Lines 5 - 8
The insults continue. You can picture the lovers being rudely awakened by the strong rays and
wanting the sun to go elsewhere. But the emphasis here is on belittling - the sun is told to go
and call on people arguably less important - boys late for school, resentful apprentices and farm
workers.
The end couplet, fully rhymed, affirms that love is beyond weather, place and time of
year. It never changes, is unaffected by the divisions of the clock.

Second Stanza
Lines 11-14
What makes you think your light is so awesome? All it takes is for me to blink an eye and, hey
presto, I've beaten you. But I don't want to waste time doing that, my eyes are for my lover
only. The speaker is boasting now, putting the sun in its place with two perfectly constructed
iambic pentameter lines - to emphasise the ease with which he could eclipse the sun.
My lover's eyes easily outshine yours, she is dazzling, and it wouldn't be such a shock if, on your
return tomorrow, the whole of India and the East and West Indies are all here in her, in our
bed.
This is hyperbole par excellence. Donne has the speaker declaring that the exotic countries of
th'Indias with their spices and gold won't be where the sun last saw them, they'll be embodied
in his lover.
Lines 19-20
And if you saw a monarch or two on your travels yesterday ask after them, I think you'll be told
they're here, in our bed.

Third Stanza
Lines 21-24
My lover is the whole world to me, and I'm total prince. End of story. Real royalty act as if
they're us; all rank, status, mark of pedigree is imitation compared to her and me. We're the
real deal, our love is our wealth, we don't need cash or bling, especially that false fool's gold the
alchemists claim to make from junk metal.
* alchemy - alchemists claimed to be able to create gold from base metals.
Lines 25-30
You're only half happy, being one. We are two and we are the entire world so, take it easy,
you're old don't forget and you've still got to keep the earth warm, it's your duty after all. To
make it easier, I invite you in to our room. Shine on our bed, into the whole room; that way this
will become your solar system with you revolving around us.
thy sphere - your solar system. Donne has the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos in mind, with the
bed the focal point around which the sun revolves.

Analysis 2

Stanza One
  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 school boys 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.
It is immediately obvious that personification is going to play an important role in this poem
when the titular object — the sun — is referred to as an “unruly,” “busy old fool.” The sun is
calling to the narrator of The Sun Rising “through windows, and through curtains” — which is
what the sun does, after all. It rises, and shines through the edges of curtains. The “calling,”
then, is simply the narrator and whomever they are with, that it is morning. The narrator begins
to list off all of the other things the sun could be doing — reminding oversleeping
schoolchildren that they are going to be later for school, beginning the day for noblemen,
anything other than waking up the speaker and reminding that they need to begin their day.
The last two lines, as well as the “us” in the third line, suggest that the speaker is not alone, but
are rather waking up alongside a lover, and that because love is timeless, the rising sun should
leave them alone, rather than force them to leave each other’s company in the bed.
The structure of The Sun Rising is noticeably unusual. Although it does rhyme, it does not follow
any particular pattern from beginning to end. The first four lines, for instance, follow an ABBA
pattern, but each line has a different syllable count. The result is a poem that does not flow
especially well, but does properly convey the frustrated mindset of the narrator who only wants
to be with his beloved.
 
Stanza Two
        Thy beams, so reverend and strong
               Why shouldst 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 leftst 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.
The narrator wants to shut the sun out of existence; it is easily possible to simply close the eyes,
clear the mind, and forget that day has even come. Unfortunately, now that the speaker sees
the person they spent the night with, they no longer want to close their eyes and not be able to
see; grudgingly, they are forced to accept the presence of the rising sun.
The rest of the verse questions the worth of leaving a bed shared with a loved one; they
reference the “Indias of spice and mine,” referencing spice foraging and mining operations in
the Eastern and Western Indies at the time, and seem to suggest that everything will run
exactly as it is supposed to whether they leave their bed or not — so they can check on a
mission that is, at present, meaningless, or they can remain with each other.
 

Stanza Three
          She’s all states, and all princes, I,
               Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor’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 center is, these walls, thy sphere.
This verse does much to emphasize the enormous importance the narrator places on their lover
— she is everyone and everywhere he ever needs to be or know, and nothing else exists while
the two are together. Honour and wealth become meaningless, princes seem poor when
compared to what they have. Returning to the personification of the sun, the narrator
addresses it once more, stating that its presence is not needed, since its purpose is to warm the
world, and he feels warm. The Sun Rising ends on a somewhat cryptic note, but suggests that
the narrator’s universe consists of two people and one room only — that bed is the centre of
the universe, and the walls of the room are its edge, and so when that room is warmed, the
whole of the world is to them.

Publication
"The Sun Rising" is a poem written by the English poet John Donne. Donne wrote a wide range
of social satire, sermons, holy sonnets, elegies, and love poems throughout his lifetime, and he
is perhaps best known for the similarities between his erotic poetry and his religious poetry.
Much of his work, including "The Sun Rising," was published after his death in the 1633
collection Songs and Sonnets. In "The Sun Rising," the speaker orders the sun to warm his bed
so that he and his lover can stay there all day instead of getting up to go to work. The poem's
playful use of language and extended metaphor exemplifies Donne's style across his work,
erotic and religious alike.

The Sun Rising” Setting

The setting of "The Sun Rising" is a bedroom. Cultural references in the first stanza, such
as "school boys," "sour prentices," "court huntsmen," "king," and "country ants," or rural
farmers, support the idea that the bedroom, like John Donne, is located in Renaissance
England. A reference in the second stanza to "th' Indias of spice and mine" situates the
bedroom globally, far away from both the East Indies and West Indies. This part of the poem
also situates the speaker within a colonial culture that profits off the exploitation of the East
Indies and West Indies, which once again supports the idea that the bedroom is located in
England, or at least Europe. However, the speaker wants to trim away all this context,
making the bedroom into an entire universe.

Tone
The tone of the speaker is disdainful and criticizing when it comes to address the sun. He
perceives the sun as weak, old, and a fool in the first few lines and by the end of the poem, he
silently admits its vitality and power in the earth for the survival of living organisms.

The speaker is initially affronted by the presence of the sun and wastes no time in
berating the intrusion, questioning its appearance at a time when love is the priority, and love is
not to be influenced or regulated by the course of a pedant.
You can picture the lovers being disturbed by bright sunshine streaming in at dawn - the
equivalent of someone shouting. All they want to do is continue their sleep. Who wouldn't be
annoyed?
The speaker's tone does shift as the poem progresses. In the second stanza all the heat has
dissipated and there is a more thoughtful approach as the speaker attempts to persuade the
sun that his lover has the power to blind him.
In the end the speaker suggests that the lover's bed and room is a microcosm of the solar
system, so the sun is invited to revolve around them.

Form
This poem does not take any specific, established form, but it does have formal similarities with
various versions of the sonnet. Whereas a sonnet has 14 lines, this poem has 30, which are
divided into three stanzas of 10 lines each. However, like most sonnets, the
predominant meter of the poem is iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is also a hybrid
of Italian and English sonnet rhyme schemes.
What's more, each stanza ends with a couplet that resolves the question or problem of that
stanza. The first stanza, which turns on the question of whether lovers must obey the sun,
ends with a couplet that declares the answer to be no. The second stanza ends with a
summarizing couplet: the sun should not think its beams "so reverend and strong" because the
entire world has been stolen out from under these beams. The third stanza, finally, ends with a
powerful couplet that resolves the entire poem: the sun can keep shining, but it should stop
trying to make the speaker and his lover leave the bedroom. To do so would be beyond the
scope of its authority.

Meter
The meter of "The Sun Rising" varies quite a bit throughout the poem, though the spots of
variation are the same in each stanza. The third, fourth, and seventh through tenth lines in each
stanza are in iambic pentameter (meaning that they're composed of five iambs, poetic feet
consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). Take line 7 and line 8:
Go tell | court hunts- | men that | the king | will ride,
Call coun- | try ants | to har- | vest of- | fices,
Iambic pentameter is one of the most common formal meters and is characteristic of many
traditional verse forms, such as the sonnet. Although the poem does not take any particular
traditional form, Donne's use of iambic pentameter demonstrates that he is a skilled and
practiced poet.
The second line in each stanza is in dimeter (just two feet per line compared to pentameter's
five). Take line 2:
Why dost | thou thus,
The poem is hardly consistent in its use of iambs, however. These departures from the standard
meter of the poem are not poetic failures, but rather serve a purpose. For example, look at line
22:
Nothing | else is.
This line consists of a trochee (“Nothing”) followed by a spondee (“else is”), resulting in a
line with three stresses in its meager two feet. This is a very important line, in which the
speaker boldly replaces the entire universe with his bedroom. The meter of the line stands out
from the rest of the poem and sounds much more emphatic, amplifying the speaker's voice as
he erases the rest of the world.
Finally, the first, fifth, and sixth lines in each stanza are in tetrameter (four feet per line). This
encourages the reader to slow down over disparaging words, adding to the tone of contempt
the speaker holds toward the sun. Again, however, the use of iambs is not consistent and the
feet are quite varied throughout. Take lines 5 and 6:
Saucy | pedan- | tic wretch, | go chide
Late school | boys and | sour pren- | tices,
The stressed syllables in both of these lines contain hard or hissing consonants in combination
with long vowels, and there is extra space in each line for the resultant harsh sounds to come
through because the lines are shorter than surrounding lines. The order and distribution of
emphasized syllables through each line is also less regular than it is in the lines in pentameter.
The choppiness adds to the cacophony that makes this description of the sun's duties sound
unappealing to the ear.
Other departures from iambic pentameter add variety, interest, or organization. The beginning
of each stanza, for example, is clearly marked out even when the poem is read aloud because
line 1, line 11, and line 21 all have four instead of five iambs.

Rhyme Scheme
Although "The Sun Rising" does not conform exactly to any specific form, it has several formal
elements in common with the sonnet. Rhyme scheme is one of these elements. Each of the
three ten-line stanzas has the following rhyme scheme:
ABBACDCDEE
This rhyme scheme is not exactly that of any traditional form, but it draws elements from the
rhyme schemes of two different sonnet types. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet's rhyme scheme
looks like this:
ABBAABBACDECDE
"The Sun Rising" seems to get the rhyme scheme of its first four lines from this type of sonnet.
Meanwhile, the CDCDEE section seems to come from the end of a Shakespearean or English
sonnet, whose rhyme scheme looks like this:
ABABBCBCCDCDEE
Each stanza of "The Sun Rising" thus looks something like a hybrid sonnet with four lines cut out
somewhere in the middle.
The mix-and-match, chaotically ordered use of established rhyme schemes reinforces the way
the speaker takes the laws of the universe and twists them to his own ends. Rhyming
conventions and universal laws are not entirely rejected, but they are upended and rewritten to
serve the desires of the speaker.

Meter & Rhyme scheme by shampoo

The form of this poem doesn't have a specific name, but it is very formal. The poem is
constructed of three ten-line stanzas and each stanza is constructed the same way.
Lines 1, 5, and 6 of each stanza are iambic tetrameter, meaning they have eight syllables with
four of them stressed. Line 2 is in dimeter, meaning it has four syllables, with two stressed. The
rest of the lines are the more standard iambic pentameter—ten syllables, five stresses.
Here's a quick breakdown of the first stanza with the stressed syllables highlighted. You'll notice
that the meter isn't perfect—perfection is boring. Variety is the spice of life.
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 school-boys, 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.
The variation of line length and the meter allows Donne to achieve some special effects. Most
noticeably, the short lines allow Donne to hammer home two sarcastic, rhetorical
questions and then level his striking proclamation: "nothing else is." That line also varies
from the iambic rhythm by giving us a spondee (two stressed syllables back-to-back) in the
last foot.
Other variations include some trochees at the beginnings of the lines. That's where you
emphasize the first syllable of the metrical foot. In doing this, Donne's speaking voice
becomes more pronounced and powerful. Donne starts the poem with one of these: "busy
old fool." It gets the poem off and running. The next-to-last line also starts this way,
emphasizing the first word: "shine here to us, and thou art everywhere."
The rhyme scheme of each stanza (ABBACDCDEE) is a quirky mix of two types
of sonnet forms, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean. The first four lines follow the
Petrarchan sonnet and generally set up the new argument or image, including rhetorical
questions. The next four conform to the sort of sonnets becoming popular during Donne's
lifetime, and they extend the image and provide some sort of proof or answer for the
argument. The final couplet, being an easier, more obvious rhyme, seals what was previously
stated in a strong and memorable way. The final lines of the poem demonstrate this sense of
closure. Argument? Won.
For more on how this form and meter is working all kinds of magic for Donne and his poetic
mojo, check out our "Sound Check" section.

Syntax
Short, sharp clauses, longer sentences and plenty of punctuation bring energy and emotion to
the speaker's voice, and help deliver the arguments and images in a dramatic, depthful manner.
Take the final couplet in the third stanza:

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.
Simplicity itself, with pauses that allow the reader to take in the conclusion, yet, typically of
Donne, he throws in an image to catch us off guard - the bed is rectangular, the room likewise,
but sphere suggests a spherical shell, one in which a celestial body might orbit in a fixed
relationship.

Symbols

The Sun
The speaker of "The Sun Rising" addresses the poem to the sun, but the sun is more than an
annoyance the speaker wants to banish. The sun sits at the top of the cosmological hierarchy: it
controls the solar system, and it answers, according to popular thought in Donne's day, only to
God. The sun represents immense, near divine power. And when the speaker overthrows the
sun and turns it into his servant, he is upending the entire order of the universe.
This order was conceived by the ancient Greeks as the "Great Chain of Being," and the concept
was later revived by Renaissance philosophers. It placed everything in the world, living or not,
somewhere along a chain that stretched from God all the way down to rocks. The sun was high
on the chain. The anonymous speaker would have been much lower. In his effort to switch
places with the sun, the speaker climbs up this chain, past the kings and princes thought to
occupy the highest possible human link in the chain. The speaker's intellectual joust with the
sun thus tangles up the Great Chain of Being.
By the end of the poem, the speaker has eliminated every link except for himself and the sun,
reforging the chain so that he is not only the top link, but also an enormous link. By addressing
the poem to the sun, which is already very high up on the Great Chain of Being, the speaker can
rise to a near godlike position and stature in the universal hierarchy.

Empire
The speaker of "The Sun Rising" is obsessed with carving out an empire for himself. However,
he refuses to leave his bed. By comparing his lover to "th' Indias of spice and mine," then to "all
states," and by comparing himself to "all kings" and "all princes," the speaker expands his
power beyond that of any earthly ruler. An empire represents, to the speaker, an extreme
position of power. Running all the empires in the world is beyond human power.

By claiming to run all these empires within the comfort of his bed, the speaker accomplishes
two things. First, he demonstrates that he doesn't need to get up in the morning in order to
work his way into a position of power. The sun might as well let him sleep in. Second, he
demonstrates that he is even more powerful than the sun by stealing entire empires out from
under its nose.
The sun, kings, and princes were all thought during the Renaissance to derive their power
directly from God. By consolidating the power of all kings and princes, and by demonstrating
that he is more powerful than the sun, the speaker becomes the most powerful being in the
universe apart from God. In this way, the speaker's conquest of all empires turns him into a
Christ-like figure. He is God's "Son Rising" to challenge the "Sun Rising" in the poem's title.

Themes
The Authority of Love
In "The Sun Rising," the speaker wants to bend the rules of the universe. Rather than allowing
the sun's "motions" across the sky to govern the way the speaker spends his time, the speaker
challenges the sun's authority and claims that love gives him (the speaker) the power to stay in
bed all day with his lover. In this way, the poem elevates the importance and power of love
above work, duty, and even the natural rhythms of the day itself.
From the start the speaker talks down to the sun, robbing it of the authority it presumes to
have when it shines "through windows, and through curtains" upon lovers in the morning. In
the first line, the sun appears as a "busy old fool" and "unruly." This language suggests that not
only is the sun foolish, but also that it ought to be "ruled" by some greater authority that it's
failing to heed.
Although the speaker concedes that the sun is free to rule over "late school boys" (as well as
several other parties for whom the speaker seems to have little respect), he claims that all he
would have to do to "eclipse and cloud" the sun would be to close his eyes. The ease of this
action demonstrates that the sun is indeed "foolish" to think that its beams are "reverend and
strong" in the face of a lover. By the third stanza, the speaker is not only giving the sun orders
to annoy others instead of him and his lover, but he's also ordering the sun to actually serve the
lovers by warming them in their bed. The lovers thus become the greater authority that the sun
itself ought to obey.
By asserting himself as the ruler of the sun, the speaker claims the authority to indefinitely
extend the dawn so that he can stay with his lover. The speaker asks the sun early on, "Must to
thy motions lovers' seasons run?" This rhetorical question suggests that the speaker wants
lovers' "seasons" to be exempt from the daily rhythms dictated by the rising of the sun. The
speaker goes on to distinguish love as unfamiliar with "the rags of time," suggesting that love is
everlasting and therefore not subject to the starts and stops of "hours, days, months," and
other temporal units that govern the lives of "school boys," "horsemen," and "country ants."
Time, including the rising and setting sun, works differently for lovers than for anyone else.
By the end of the poem, the speaker has "contracted" the entire world to the bed, so that the
sun’s job is to "warm" there. Whereas most people must leave their beds during the day in
order to accomplish their jobs, the speaker's insistence that love is the most important
occupation anyone could have makes the bed into a sort of daytime workplace. What's more,
that workplace is so important that the sun must drop what it is doing everywhere else in order
to make the "work" of the bedroom possible.
The way the speaker reverses power in the poem doesn't simply make the sun into a servant of
the speaker: the speaker diverts the sun from everyone else, demanding that it shine only on
him and his lover. In this way, the speaker puts the rest of the world's productivity on hold.
Instead of seizing the day by jumping out of bed, he is seizing everyone else's day for himself.
Love as a Microcosm of the Universe
Like much of Donne's poetry, "The Sun Rising" uses metaphor to pack the entire world into a
small space. This technique is grounded in the idea of a "microcosm," a popular Renaissance
belief that the human body was a small-scale model of the whole universe. In the case of "The
Sun Rising," the small space is not a single body but rather the lovers' bed. The speaker claims
that "to warm the world" is the same thing as "warming us," transforming himself into a kind of
king of the world and the center of the universe. In fact, love in the poem is so grand that the
universe itself exists within the relationship between the two lovers.
The speaker uses extended metaphor not only to compare his bed to an empire but also to
annex (that is, to take in) all of the world's empires into his own bed. In so doing, he collapses
the expansive world into the space of his bedroom. In the second stanza, the speaker demands
of the sun to look for "both th' Indias of spice and mine" in the place where they were last
located. (The "Indias" referenced are the East Indies and the West Indies, both of which had
been colonized by European nations by the time Donne was writing.) The speaker goes on to
claim that these peripheral sources of imperial wealth and power now "lie here with me,"
meaning that they have been incorporated into the body of the speaker's lover.
The speaker goes on to claim that the kings of the empires that extend into the East and West
Indies "All here in one bed lay." The speaker doesn't mean that the bed is literally full of kings.
Rather, this line suggests that the kings and the power they represent have all been
incorporated into the body of the speaker. As the kings conquer more nations in an effort to
expand their empires, these far-ranging empires are simply relocated to and consolidated in the
lovers' bed. Because the speaker's lover is figured as "all states" and the speaker himself is
figured as "all princes," the world outside the bedroom falls away. The speaker is able to claim
that "Nothing else is," meaning that the relationship between the two lovers is all that matters
(or, that this relationship is so expansive that it contains the entire universe within it).
The speaker's transformation of himself into the rightful heir to all the world's thrones gives
him greater sovereignty (ruling power) than any individual ruler has. By turning the bed into a
microcosm, then, the speaker is able to inflate his own importance so that his orders to the sun
are justified rather than insubordinate (unlike the sun, the speaker isn't "unruly").
Although the "court huntsmen" of the first stanza serve the king—who can decide whether or
not to ride on any given day—the king still must time his rides according to daylight and
weather patterns. The speaker, meanwhile, is able to assign the sun "duties" according to his
will. The sun thus serves the speaker as the court huntsmen serve the king. This impossible
reordering of the universe inflates the speaker's power past the point that any earthly prince or
king's power can grow. And if the subordination of the sun is not enough, the speaker also
undermines the power of political rulers directly in comparison to himself. He insists that he is
not mimicking a prince but rather that, "Princes do but play us." The speaker and his lover are
the paragon of imperial power. Real princes only imitate the lovers.
By "contracting" the entire world to the microcosm of the bed, the speaker asserts the
authority and all-encompassing power granted to him by love.

Love and Divinity

The speaker's inflation of his importance in relation to political rulers is underscored by a
playfully bold insinuation that to wake up in bed with a lover is analogous to an ascent to divine
power. In other words, waking up to your boyfriend or girlfriend can make you feel like a god.
Although the speaker never explicitly names any religious themes, the poem's preoccupation
with sovereignty (ruling power) evokes the notion of the divine right of kings. Kings in Donne's
day were traditionally thought to derive their ruling power directly from God. If the speaker
becomes more powerful than all of the world's rulers put together, he thus approaches godlike
power.
On top of this implicit gesture to the divine, which Donne's readers would definitely have
understood, the speaker calls into question that idea that the sun's beams are "reverend," or
worthy of being worshipped like God. Whereas earthly kings must still kneel before the sun
because it is one of the few things God does not place in their control, the speaker manages to
transform the sun into a servant that kneels before him. The speaker thus becomes more
"reverend" than the sun.
The poem's title furthermore likens the speaker to Christ upon his resurrection. Although the
sun is explicitly the one who is "rising" according to the title, the entire poem is a meditation on
the speaker's imperative to rise from bed. Because of this double "rising," and because the
speaker positions himself as the one the sun must worship as kings worship the sun, the
speaker might be said to be a second "sun rising ." Read aloud, as this poem was meant to be,
the title contains a double entendre: "sun rising" also sounds like "son rising." The phrase "son
rising" naturally evokes the rising or resurrection of Christ, the son of God. The speaker's
thwarting of natural laws over the course of the poem is similar to Christ's thwarting of death
via crucifixion. This similarity supports the notion that when the speaker wakes up in bed with
his lover, he is experiencing a kind of divine resurrection that vests him with new Christlike
sovereignty over kings, time, and nature.
The speaker's near-heretical claim to divine power is built upon his relationship with his lover.
Only by likening her body to all the world's empires is the speaker able to assert himself as this
Christlike figure who is exempt from the natural laws to which emperors must defer. Love, sex,
and religion are intertwined in much of Donne's poetry. In this poem, love and sex are not only
as powerful as religious devotion. Furthermore, love and sex forge an incredible intimacy
between the lover and God. To lie in bed with a lover is not to refuse God. On the contrary, it is
to rise as God's son.
Dissatisfaction
Sure, "The Sun Rising" is a love poem, but you'll notice the speaker never actually talks to his
main squeeze. Instead, he's whining at the sun to leave him alone. Mostly, that's because he
doesn't want the night to end. He doesn't want to rejoin the world. Hey, speaker, we never said
love was easy. It's full of disappointments.

Community
We aren't just individuals—we are part of a larger society, and John Donne won't let you forget
it. Still, "The Sun Rising" is a lot about a speaker's desire to (even temporarily) escape the
responsibilities and restrictions of the outside world and just experience his love. You know,
without all the meddling from friends and family.

Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Personification
The speaker personifies the sun throughout nearly the entire poem as a self-important old man
in order to rob the sun of its authority. This personification begins in the very first line, when
the speaker addresses his words to a "Busy old fool, unruly sun." The poem thus opens with the
introduction of the sun as a character with human traits. These traits are not to be looked upon
favorably. In the speaker's ageist portrayal of the sun, it is getting "unruly," meaning that it is
getting worse as it ages at serving those it is supposed to serve, but it is too "foolish" to realize
its own decline.
The negative characterization of the sun remains consistent throughout the poem, so that the
speaker's proposition at the end, for the sun to confine itself to the bedroom, is founded on the
assumption that, "Thine age asks ease." Essentially, the speaker is telling the sun, "You're too
old to be working so much these days." This is a veiled insult that, on the surface, might be read
as a show of care and respect for the sun. However, the use of the familiar "thine" rather than
the respectful "your" (again, in Donne's day "you" was actually a more formal form of address
than "thou") demonstrates that the speaker is talking down to the sun rather than up to it: the
uppity speaker turns himself into the sun's boss and offers it semi-retirement if it will only
consent to do his bidding. The speaker's personification of the sun as an aging man thus allows
him to invert the power dynamic between himself and the sun over the course of the poem.
Although the speaker only explicitly describes the characteristics of the sun in lines 1 and 5, the
speaker orders the sun to take many actions, such as "go chide," "look," and "ask for." The
speaker also implies that the sun has eyes to be blinded and that it leaves colonies lying around
like collectibles. By the time the speaker tells the sun in line 25 that "Thou, sun, art half as
happy as we," it seems natural that the sun would experience a human emotion like happiness.
After all, it seems to have plenty of human agency and other human features. By turning the
sun into a sentient being that thinks, acts, and feels, the speaker sets the stage to assign the sun
"duties" in line 27. If the sun wants to be a person, the speaker seems to say, it will have to get
a job like everyone else.
Go tell court human that the king will ride,
Here is an example of personification of sun.
                 In  a personification…………..
Here ‘sun’ an inanimate object in given the attribution of loving being by the use of the
verb go chide or ‘go tell’ in the first and third line.

Allusions
An allusion in a poem refers to a person, place, historical event, or ancient source such as the
Bible, mythology, ancient poets etc. ... Shakespeare is creating this allusion to enhance internal
meaning and to indicate that he is really referencing "forbidden love"
People References:
Line 7 refers to a king riding out on a hunt, giving a shout-out to the reigning King James, who
was known as a sportsman.
Places References:
The "Indias of spice and mine" in line 17 refer to India in Asia, famed as a trade place of exotic
goods such as spices; and to the "newly" discovered West Indies, or Caribbean Islands, which
were thought to be rich in precious metals.
Science References:
Donne refers to new beliefs about the way light beams work and how people see (11), the still
prevalent (though increasingly discredited) belief in alchemy—turning metals into gold through
sorcery or science—and the view of the universe as a set of concentric circles with the earth as
the center (30).

Parallelism
Parallelism is when an author constructs parts of a sentence to be grammatically similar, often
repeating a specific word, phrase, or idea. This repetition creates a connection between the
ideas discussed.
In the third line, Donne repeats the word "through" which adds to the poem's rhythm.

"Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?"

Metaphor
1. Busy old fool, unruly sun,
This line has a metaphor.
            
 Here ‘sun’ and ‘fool’ are compared to each other. As a court jesture is ‘busy’
purposelessly, ‘old’ of age and ‘unruly’ in behavior, the sun also by shining on the ‘lovers,
behaves like a fool. The comparison is implicitly drawn here.

2. Must to thy notions lover’s season run?

 This line consists of another metaphor.
Here ‘the course of love’ and ‘yearly seasons’ are compared to each other implicitly. As the
season changes with the time, the course of love also carries various stages.

3. Call country ants to harvest offices;

Here is metaphor in third line too.
     Here ‘farmers’ are compared to ‘country ants’ in point of their huge numbers
and earthly living.

-His wife is compared to "all States", meaning she is the whole world. Donne compares himself
to "all Princes", meaning he is the ruler of the whole world (meaning the two are meant to go
together, or that he sees her as land to be conquered). 

Imagery: 
Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. For example, “Busy
old fool, unruly sun”, “Through windows, and through curtains call on us” and “This bed thy
center is, these walls, thy sphere.”

Hyperbola
1. I could eclipse and could them with a wink,
The third line and fifth line are hyperbolic.
             In a hyperbole……………
  Here the point of exaggeration is that ‘the lover would eclipse the sun with a
mere wink of eyes’ or ‘the beloved’s eye is so bright that if would blind the sun
itself’.

Metaphysical Conceit in “The Sun Rising”

The most striking quality of Donne’s poetry is the use of metaphysical conceit which is a figure
of speech in which two farfetched objects or images of very different nature are compared. It
surprises its readers by its ingenious discovery and delights them by its intellectual quality. A
metaphysical conceit is usually classified as a subtype of metaphor – an elaborate and strikingly
unconventional or supposedly far-fetched metaphor, hyperbole, contradiction, simile, paradox
or oxymoron causing a shock to the reader by the obvious dissimilarity, “distance” between or
stunning incompatibility of the objects compared.
The main conceit or metaphor of “The Sun Rising” is the personification of the sun into an old
man – a "busy old fool" – whose business it is to get everyone out of bed and on the way to
work. The persona adopted by the poet sees fit to argue with the sun, and this creates a comic
opening to the poem. This is extended when, in the second stanza, he claims that he is stronger
than the sun, because he can "eclipse and cloud" his beams just by blinking. This is of course
true, but it does not really mean that the sun is not "so reverend, and strong". At the end of the
poem he treats the Sun more gently: his "age asks ease" so they are in the position to help him,
since he only has to warm the two of them, and he warms the whole world.
The secondary conceit is the metaphor that the speaker’s lover is "all states" – she is all the
treasures of the world. As a result, therefore, he is "all princes". Donne elevates the importance
of the relationship using this hyperbole.
He combines this hyperbole (the speaker has all the power in the world) with litotes (deliberate
understatement for literary effect), in his deliberate reduction of the importance of everything
else. Measurements of time, i.e. "hours, days, months", are likened to "rags", all honour is
"mimic" (ie fake), and wealth is "alchemy" (ie it isn’t real). He sums it up with the statement
"nothing else is". This combination of the two techniques demonstrates how great their love is.
Metaphorically, it is the only thing in the world – and so their room becomes the whole
"sphere" for the sun.
Donne never ceases to impress by showcasing the strong emotions reflected by the conceit,
network of images and the extraordinarily witty and ingenious language. It is the amazingly
original conceit that makes his poems with a common love topic so uncommon. Donne’s poems
are quite capable of stirring the emotions, and no matter how uncommon and intellectual his
conceits, his poems would not work without a seed of genuine feeling at their centre. “The Sun
Rising”is a classic love poem in the history of world literature.
Features of metaphysical poetry in "The Sun Rising"?

One
n the poem “The Sun Rising” by English poet John Donne, the features of metaphysical poetry
are quite apparent. First, Donne is engaging in an intellectual but conjectural conversation with
the Sun. The Sun cannot respond to him and does not acknowledge any kind of communication
with a human being. This is what is to be expected, hence this one-way conversation of the
heart and mind between a living being and a celestial object. This is typical of metaphysical
poetry, pondering things beyond humankind’s reach, things that seem so magnificent and awe-
inspiring.
Another feature of metaphysical poems is the religious aspect to many of them. An example of
this is John Donne’s poem “A Hymn to God the Father.” There is an allusion to religion and
holiness in “The Sun Rising” with the line “Thy beams so reverend, and strong.” Donne is setting
the sun’s rays on a higher plane here, calling them venerated in a sense. Metaphysical poetry
often tackles the great questions in life through the avenue of religion and religious thought. It
is common for metaphysical poetry to contemplate the supernatural.
Another feature of metaphysical poetry is philosophical discussions of grand themes, such as
Love, Death, War, and so on. In “The Sun Rising,” Love is brought to the forefront. Donne asks
“Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” He is saying that the sun controls time and seasons
and that we follow its dictates in this. The sun marks time as we live and love on this earth.
Another feature of metaphysical poetry is that it contemplates man’s place in the universe. It
often makes us see ourselves as something less than what we think we are - our lives
superimposed over the vast and limitless expanse of space. It causes us to ask questions of why
we are here and what our ultimate destiny is. There is an abstract, ethereal or otherworldly
quality to metaphysical poetry.

Two
If we go with the traditional characteristics of metaphysical poetry, certainly John Donne fits
the bill with The Sun Rising.
First, metaphysical poetry often presents an argument against an unseen element, or an
element that cannot answer back. In this case, the speaker is fighting the Sun.

Second, the use of hyperbolic description, simile, and language like Donne uses when
describing the intensity of his love, is also traditional of metaphysical poetry.
Third, the intensity of deep thought, philosophy, and sensibility are more evident in this type of
poetry than in traditional poetry, and Donne again hits right on with his philosophical comment
on how the sun should "be somewhere else when is needed". That is a sign of existentialism,
and this is also very typical of metaphysical poetry.
Most importantly: Symbolism is the biggest and most important characteristic. In this case, the
Sun symbolized passion, grandeur, energy, love, passion, intensity, gravity. This, as well as in
other poems like Death be Not Proud, and The Flea, Donne indeed places strong value in
symbols and representation in verse.