Selected Poems by John Donne

‘Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,/In that the world's contracted thus;’ – as the world is only the size of their bedroom.

‘This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.’ – The bed replaces the ‘centre’ (the earth), the walls of the bedroom replace the crystal ‘sphere’ which in medieval cosmology (following the ideas of Ptolemy) surrounded the earth and carried around upon it the disc of the sun.

Language

This poem is an exercise in the excesses of rhetoric. Starting from a small, if acerbic, beginning – ‘Busy old fool’ – the poem becomes more and more extreme in its claims, and grander and grander in scale until the lovers’ bedroom becomes the size of the solar system, indeed the universe: ‘Nothing else is.’ This line is perhaps the best in the poem, as its rhetorical brevity sums up the speaker’s remarkable boast. The expanding form of each stanza from short lines to long lines provides a rhythmic mechanism which enacts and enables this movement towards ever more excessive claims. At the heart of the poem therefore is a rhetoric of power and dominance, as the speaker demeans the very sun on which we all depend, and this, perhaps inevitably, reveals an unhealthy complex of domination, both in the way the European mind saw the East and West as worlds to conquer and colonize, and also in the way that the male speaker is seen to dominate and subdue his loved one, who is both ‘states’ and ‘riches’ controlled by a male king. A key word, therefore, perhaps, is ‘unruly:’ Donne describes the sun as ‘unruly’ – failing to conform to his egoistical ‘rule.’ Of course, the excess of this poem no doubt means that the reader should not take it too seriously. Donne’s speaker is being ridiculously arrogant, and sending himself up in the process.