Analyze and explain John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising."
The Sun Rising is a monologue to the Sun, in which the narrator both exalts it and insults bringing with it a lot of descriptive and emotive language that gears towards the necessity of the Sun in the lives of individuals, similarly as one needs love, God, or any other power that is higher than us.
In this poem, he first asks the Sunlight, just entering his room, to go away. Apparently he is in love and is sharing his bed with his lover, and seeing the sun rising makes him realize that its time to leave the bed, and face the day. He asks for it to go somewhere where he is needed: At hunting parties, in places where people want it to be daylight. But he doesn't.
Then, he praises the sun for being the alseeing eye that lights up the planet, how we gravitate towards it due...
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to its might, and he compares the brightness of the sun and the intensity of its heat and power to the love he feels for his lover, saying that nothing can shine like their love, her eyes, everything.
In terms of form, this poem is highly exaggerated (hyperbolic). It is rich in metaphor and simile, and it accentuates the main ideas of romance, passion, and love by comparing all three to the heat, brightness, and pull of the son as a massive star. It is one of the most famous poems of John Donne, and certainly one of the richest in language.
What is the main theme of "The Sun Rising" by John Donne?
This poem addresses the sun in a chiding way because the speaker is lying in bed with his love, and the sun is waking them up. He calls the sun a "busy old fool" that is calling to them through the window, with its beams. The speaker tells the sun to go somewhere else - go wake up schoolboys, go tell the king's hunstmen that it's time to go hunting -- go anywhere but stop pestering him and his love. In the second stanza, he tells the sun that it is not so great - why, he could shut out the sun's beams by simply closing his eyes but if he did that, then he would not be able to look upon his love. The speaker continues to criticize the sun for being old and not understanding their passion because all the sun has to do is shine on them and bug them:
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.
What is the significance of the sun in John Donne's "The Sun Rising"?
As is often the case with Donne's poetry, in “The Sun Rising,” love is presented to us as illicit, something that is under threat from one kind of authority or another. In “The Flea,” for example, parental disapproval is one of the factors that prevents the speaker from bedding his beloved.
In “The Sun Rising,” it is the sun itself that gets in the way of love. The speaker positively resents the fact that the sun and its movements should get to dictate how he spends his time. The speaker would happily spend all day in bed with his lady love, ignoring the shining sun in the sky that tells him, along with schoolboys running late and surly apprentices, that it's time to get up.
For the speaker, the power of love is so great, enjoys so much authority, that it transcends everything, even the natural rhythms of the day. The sun, this “busy old fool,” may be a necessary precondition for life on earth, but for the speaker, it's nothing more than a nuisance: a bright, shining busybody which presumes to dictate to him how he should live his life. He's not prepared to allow this; love conquers all, including the sun.