The Sun Rising

JOHN DONNE
 Busy old fool, unruly sun,
               Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
               Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
               Late school boys and sour prentices,
         Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
         Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
               Thy beams, so reverend and strong
               Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
               If her eyes have not blinded thine,
               Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
         Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
         Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.
               She's all states, and all princes, I,
               Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
               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.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Main Theme of John Donne’s The Sun Rising

The theme of love in all its rich variety fascinated Donne, and he
expressed this fascination in the range of attitudes and responses to
love in his Songs and Sonnets. Heir to the Petrarchan code of the abject
lover prostrate before his proud and unrelenting mistress, Donne
parodies this tradition in poems such as “The Blossom” and “The
Funeral.” He advocates promiscuity in lighthearted poems such as “The
Indifferent” and writes a witty seduction poem in “The Flea.” He
questions the constancy of men and women in such cynical poems as
“Loves Usury” and “Womans Constancy,” and he portrays love that is
both physical and spiritual in poems such as “The Good-Morrow,” “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” and “The Ecstasy.”

“The Sun Rising,” although it does not explicitly blend body and soul, is
nevertheless an argument for the grandeur of love that can combine
spiritual and sexual love in perfect equality. Donne insists that the sun
has no power over perfect love, reasoning that, since the lovers are the
world, the sun will fulfill its duties by remaining in the bedroom; he
outrageously asserts that “Nothing else is,” testifying to the superiority
of a love that is “all alike.”
The power of hyperbole, the trope chosen by Donne to embody the
separateness of love, lies in its forcible straining of the truth and its
ability to go beyond truth to express an ideal. Hyperbole, however, can
also overshoot its mark and become an empty affectation, undercutting
the ideal it is intended to defend. Eminently aware of the dangers
inherent in the hyperbole, Donne manages to push each hyperbole in this
poem to its limit so that the mistress, the reader, and the sun are
convinced of the...

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In the Poem poet asks the sun why it is shining and disturbing him and
his lover in bed. The sun should go away and do other things rather than
disturb them, like wake up school boys or ants to start their day. Because
Lovers should be permitted to make their own time as they want. And
After all, sunbeams are nothing compared to the power of love and
everything the sun might see around the world will not come close to the
beauty of his love and that's why the bedroom is the whole world to the
poet.