Selected Poems by John Donne

The Sun Rising , though is an exuberant and deliberately shocking love poem, and its aim is to be humorous, not serious. When Donne attacks the flagging virility of the sun, an ‘old fool’ whose ‘age asks ease,’ he is implicitly crowing about his own extraordinary potency; the fact remains, though, that he is going to have to get up and leave his mistress however much he blusters. This undertone derives from the very genre of the poem itself: The Sun Rising is another aubade – a poem celebrating a secret night of love interrupted by the dawn.

The Sun Rising is often used as an example of Donne’s ‘conversational’ style of poetry. But it would be difficult to imagine having much of a conversation with the Donne of The Sun Rising ; he poses throughout the poem as someone of such importance that any conversation would be impertinence. The tone is one of command throughout, with all its nuances of sheer rudeness, mockery, bluster, condescension and sarcasm.

Details

‘Busy old fool, unruly Sun,/Why dost thou thus,/Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?/Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?’ – This is a brilliant bit of prosody. The first line is marked by a strong caesura, and falls into two four syllable half lines, echoed by the four syllables of the second line. This then becomes a syllable pattern of 3+4+3 in line three, and only in line four does the tension resolve itself into a full phrase (and line) of ten syllables.

There is an amusing thought behind the idea of ‘lovers’ seasons,’ given that the real seasons, of course, are caused by the ‘motions’ of the sun.
‘Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide/Late school-boys and sour prentices,’ – a pedant is literally a teacher, so the idea chimes in with this line’s ‘school-boys.’

‘Call country ants to harvest offices;’ – The speaker borrows the ‘contempt’ of the sun, to whom people look as small as ants.