Selected Poems by John Donne

‘Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,/Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.’ – The lover is as oblivious of time as he is of space. Ironically, the speaker’s anger is a consequence of the sun’s demand that he must get up and leave his lover, so he is, of course, being controlled by time in reality.

‘Thy beams so reverend, and strong/Why shouldst thou think ?’ – the inversion of sense here carries considerable vituperative force. The word ‘reverend’ suggests the sun’s great age (which should be ‘revered’) – a theme which runs from the first line up to ‘Thine age asks ease’ in the last stanza.

‘If her eyes have not blinded thine,’ – The eyes of a beautiful woman are always ‘brighter than the sun’ in Elizabethan poetry.

‘Whether both th’Indias of spice and mine’ – refers to the West Indies from which precious metals were mined and the East Indies from whence spices were derived.

‘Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.’ – meaning that the riches from the very ends of the earth are in bed with the speaker.

‘Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,/And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”’ – The speaker is saying, ‘because I rule all the most precious materials of the earth in ruling my beloved, I, in my person, encompass all the kings of the world.’

‘Nothing else is;’ – Donne’s most astonishing statement of the idea that love subsumes the entire universe. For those in love, the rest of the world simply ceases to exist.

‘Princes do but play us; compared to this,/All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.’ – The speaker’s situation reverses appearance and reality: real princes are just actors playing them; those who are honoured or highly regarded are merely mimicking the truly honoured lovers; real wealth compared to their wealth is just like the fool’s gold produced by dishonest alchemists, who were pretending to turn lead into real gold.