St Xavier’s College, Mahuadanr

Themes in the Poem “The Sun Rising”

The main theme of this poem is love. It is basically a celebration of love

through the metaphysical conceit carried through, in the form of the sun.
Although this poem does not explicitly blend body and soul is nevertheless an
argument of love that can combine spiritual and physical love in perfect equality.

1. The Authority of Love:

In “The Sun Rising” the speaker wants to bend the rules of the universe,
Rather than allowing the sun’s movements across the sky to govern the way it
supposed to be, the speaker challenges the authority of Sun and claims that love
gives him the power to stay in bed all day with his lover. In this way the poem
elevates the importance and the power of love about the natural rhythms of the
day.

The speaker distinguishes love as unfamiliar with “the rags of time” and
suggests 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 others.
Time, including the rising and setting sun works differently for lovers than for
anyone else.

2. Love as a Microcosm of the Universe:

In “The Sun Rising” John Donne uses metaphor to pack the entire world into
a small space. This technique is grounded in the idea of “Microcosm”. This idea is
derived from a popular Renaissance belief that the human body was a small scale
model of the whole Universe. In this poem the small space is not a single body but
rather the lover’s bed. The speaker transforms himself into a kind of king of the
world and the bed as the center of the universe. He claims that “to warm the
world” is the same thing as warming them. In fact love in this poem is so grand
that the universe itself exist within the relationship between the two lovers.

The speaker uses extended metaphor not only to compare his bed into an
Empire but also to take in all the world’s Empires into his own bed. In doing so he
contracts the entire world into the space of his bedroom, because he figures his
lover as “all states” and himself as all princes. So he claims that these peripheral
sources of Imperial wealth and power now “lie here with me” incorporated into the
body of the speaker’s lover.

By turning the bed into a microcosm the speaker is able to increase his own
importance, so that his orders to the sun are justified rather than insubordinate.
The speaker says that “Nothing else is real”, meaning that the relationship between
the two lovers is all That matters, that this relationship is expansive that it
contains the entire Universe within it.

By contracting the entire world to the microcosm of the bed the speaker
affirms the authority and all-encompassing power granted to him by love.