Analysing Donne's The Sun Rising: as a Metaphysical and Philosophical Love Poem

At the beginning of the 17th century the love poetry of John Donne expressed a strong and independent spirit. He combined in his lyrics passionate emotional intensity with keen and active intelligence displayed in logical analysis and verbal wit, especially the extensive use of puns, equivocations, and the conceit or extended metaphor. All these features in some sense work in a principle of contraries. Dr. Johnson, noted Donne's fondness for conceits, which he called "discordia concors", the "discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike". This kind of peculiar poetic vision and practice, however, had much to do with the kind of culture he inherited, a culture, which, based on medieval world view and ethos, suddenly seemed to change in the face of the Copernican science and new geographical discoveries. Donne faced a moral vacuum and experienced the unstable nature of the universe. So he tried to find out a resolution, first in the Neo-Platonic theory and then finally in the traditional Christian religion. The Sun Rising may be said to be an intellectual exercise in reversing the contemporary Copernican heliocentric system, in which the sun was given a dominant centrality. Donne makes the lovers undercut that centrality by playing the part of the decentred earth and asserting their former supremacy in the geometric Ptolemic context. 

It has been suggested, for instance, by J.B. Leishman that the poem was partly inspired by the 13th elegy of the 1st Book of Ovid's Amores. . But speaker's irreverence and the use of extravagant conceits are without precedent:

"Busy old fool, unruly sun

Why dost thou thus

Through the window and through curtains call on us?"

At one this kind of address of the sun reverses the tradition of hundreds of Petrarchan and Elizabethan love-poems, in which the sun is a touchstone of ecstatic tribute—"the golden eye of heaven", "Hyperion" etc. In this respect, the poem can be marked as an inverted aubade, in which the sun is pursued through three stanzas of sustained exhilaration.

However, any potentiality comic effect is undercut by a note of seriousness, applied in a dramatic manner. Donne's imagery, though bizarre and exaggerated as a 'pseudo-argument' asserts what every Platonist and Christian really believes. At certain moments, any man might be wrapt beyond mortality, in the eternal intimation of spiritual love. This belief leads Donne to gather his confidence and defy time:

"Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are rags of time."

From the philosophical point of view, this statement goes triumphantly over the assumed contempt for the sun, attesting that the world fittingly symbolised in the "school-boys" and "sowre prentices", the "country ants" and the "Court-huntsmen" is indeed tinged with illusions. In calling the material world unreal, the poet is saying with Plato, that even the world's princes and potentates are mere shadows, an imitation in time of the timeless ideals.

Such complex of ideas remains in the second stanza too. The sun and the lovers have actually changed roles, with the mistress for an instant becoming the sun, and her "eye-beams" blinding the usurped lord of light. Love is not a mere reflection of the lover's needs, subjective and transient; it is homage to beauty revealed and revered:

"She is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is:

…compar'd to this

All honour's mimic…"

Donne is here praising mutual love as an experience of supreme value that opposes the transitory material world and finally transcends it. But remarkably, transcendence of the physical world and mortality is accomplished not by denial of the body but by its fulfilment. Whereas Neo-Platonist like Baldasar Castiglione suggests in his The Book of the Courtier, that the lover can ascend to spiritual love only by leaving behind the impure body, Donne insists that transcendental spiritual love is also sexual indeed, that lovers transcend the physicality of existence by embracing the body.

On reaching this conclusion of supreme value, the lovers can invite the sun to carry on his business for they are beyond the reach of the co-ordinates of time in their world "contracted thus":

"Shine here to us, and thou art every where

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere".

This world of love contains everything of value; it is the only one worth exploring and possessing. Hence the microcosm of love becomes and more important than the macrocosm.

At the beginning of the 17th century the love poetry of John Donne expressed a strong and independent spirit. He combined in his lyrics passionate emotional intensity with keen and active intelligence displayed in logical analysis and verbal wit, especially the extensive use of puns, equivocations, and the conceit or extended metaphor. All these features in some sense work in a principle of contraries. Dr. Johnson, noted Donne's fondness for conceits, which he called "discordia concors", the "discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike". This kind of peculiar poetic vision and practice, however, had much to do with the kind of culture he inherited, a culture, which, based on medieval world view and ethos, suddenly seemed to change in the face of the Copernican science and new geographical discoveries. Donne faced a moral vacuum and experienced the unstable nature of the universe. So he tried to find out a resolution, first in the Neo-Platonic theory and then finally in the traditional Christian religion. The Sun Rising may be said to be an intellectual exercise in reversing the contemporary Copernican heliocentric system, in which the sun was given a dominant centrality. Donne makes the lovers undercut that centrality by playing the part of the decentred earth and asserting their former supremacy in the geometric Ptolemic context.

It has been suggested, for instance, by J.B. Leishman that the poem was partly inspired by the 13th elegy of the 1st Book of Ovid's Amores. . But speaker's irreverence and the use of extravagant conceits are without precedent:

"Busy old fool, unruly sun

Why dost thou thus

Through the window and through curtains call on us?"

At one this kind of address of the sun reverses the tradition of hundreds of Petrarchan and Elizabethan love-poems, in which the sun is a touchstone of ecstatic tribute—"the golden eye of heaven", "Hyperion" etc. In this respect, the poem can be marked as an inverted aubade, in which the sun is pursued through three stanzas of sustained exhilaration.

However, any potentiality comic effect is undercut by a note of seriousness, applied in a dramatic manner. Donne's imagery, though bizarre and exaggerated as a 'pseudo-argument' asserts what every Platonist and Christian really believes. At certain moments, any man might be wrapt beyond mortality, in the eternal intimation of spiritual love. This belief leads Donne to gather his confidence and defy time:

"Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are rags of time."

From the philosophical point of view, this statement goes triumphantly over the assumed contempt for the sun, attesting that the world fittingly symbolised in the "school-boys" and "sowre prentices", the "country ants" and the "Court-huntsmen" is indeed tinged with illusions. In calling the material world unreal, the poet is saying with Plato, that even the world's princes and potentates are mere shadows, an imitation in time of the timeless ideals.

Such complex of ideas remains in the second stanza too. The sun and the lovers have actually changed roles, with the mistress for an instant becoming the sun, and her "eye-beams" blinding the usurped lord of light. Love is not a mere reflection of the lover's needs, subjective and transient; it is homage to beauty revealed and revered:

"She is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is:

…compar'd to this

All honour's mimic…"

Donne is here praising mutual love as an experience of supreme value that opposes the transitory material world and finally transcends it. But remarkably, transcendence of the physical world and mortality is accomplished not by denial of the body but by its fulfilment. Whereas Neo-Platonist like Baldasar Castiglione suggests in his The Book of the Courtier, that the lover can ascend to spiritual love only by leaving behind the impure body, Donne insists that transcendental spiritual love is also sexual indeed, that lovers transcend the physicality of existence by embracing the body.

On reaching this conclusion of supreme value, the lovers can invite the sun to carry on his business for they are beyond the reach of the co-ordinates of time in their world "contracted thus":

"Shine here to us, and thou art every where

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere".

This world of love contains everything of value; it is the only one worth exploring and possessing. Hence the microcosm of love becomes and more important than the macrocosm.

John Donne: A metaphysical poet

Dryden once remarked:
"Donne affects metaphysics not only in his satires but in amorous verses, too, where nature only should reign."


Though Donne was influenced by the sixteenth and the seventeenth century poets, yet he did not tread on the beaten track. His concept of poetry was unconventional. In his poetry, intellect takes the form, primarily, of wit by which heterogeneous ideas are yoked together by violence. The seventeenth century poets labeled his poetry as 'strong line poetry', mainly, on account of his concise expression and his deliberate toughness. In his life, he was never called a metaphysical poet. After his death, his poetry was re-evaluated and some other important features were found in it, which won the name of a metaphysical poet for Donne.

Grierson's defines metaphysical poetry as:

"Poetry inspired by a philosophical concept of the universe and the role assigned to human spirit in the great drama of existence".


This definition is based on the metaphysical poetry of Dante, Goethe and Yeats. So "metaphysical" is applicable to poetry who is highly philosophical or which touches philosophy.

Combination of passion and thought characterizes his work. His use of conceit is often witty and sometimes fantastic. His hyperboles are outrageous and his paradoxes astonishing. He mixes fact and fancy in a manner which astounds us. He fills his poems with learned and often obscure illusions besides, some of his poems are metaphysical in literal sense, they are philosophical and reflective, and they deal with concerns of the spirit or soul.

Conceit is an ingredient which gives a special character to Donne's metaphysical poetry. Some of his conceits are far-fetched, bewildering and intriguing. He welds diverse passions into something harmonious.

"When thou weep'st, unkindly kinde,
My lifes blood doth decay."

"When a teare falls, that thou falst which it bore,"
"Here lies a she-sun and a he-moon there"


"All women shall adore us, and some men."
His approach is based on logical reasoning and arguments. He provides intellectual parallels to his emotional experiences. His modus operandi was "to move from the contemplation of fact to a deduction from it and, thence, to a conclusion". He contemplates fidelity in a woman but, in reality, draws it impossible of find a faithful woman.


"No where
Lives a woman true, and faire."

He does not employ emotionally exciting rhythm. His poetry goes on lower ebb. Even his love poems do not excite emotions in us. Even in a "Song" while separating, he is logical that he is not parting for weariness of his beloved.

"But since that I
Must dye at last, 'tis best,
To use my selfe in jest
Thus by fain'd deaths to dye;"


His speculations and doctrines are beyond common human experience. His ideas are beyond the understanding of a layman and are a blend of intellect and emotions making his approach dialectical and scholastic. He asks his beloved in "The Message" to keep his eyes and heart because they might have learnt certain ills from her, but then, he asks her to give them back so that he may laugh at her and see her dying when some other proves as false to her as she has proved to the poet.

Donne was a self-conscious artist, therefore, had a desire to show off his learning. In his love poetry, he gives illustrations from the remote past. In his divine poems, he gives biblical references like the Crucification.

"Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?"
"Get with child a mandrake roote."

"But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall."
Metaphysical poetry is highly concentrated and so is Donne's poetry. In "The Good Morrow", he says

"For love, all love of other sights controules."
"For, not in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere."

"Hee that hath all can have no more."
His poetry is full of arguments, persuasion, shock and surprise. Instead of conventional romantic words, he used scientific and mathematical words to introduce roughness in his poetry; e.g. he used the words 'stife twin compasses', 'cosmographers', 'trepidation of the spheres' etc.

His style is highly fantastic, curt and he uses rough words. He rejects the conventional style which was romantic, soft and diffused.

Paradoxical statements are also found in his poems. In "The Indifferent" Donne describes constancy in men as vice and ask them:


"Will no other vice content you?"

In "The Legacy" the lover becomes his own 'executor and legacy'. In "Love's Growth" the poet's love seems to have increased in spring, but now it cannot increase because it was already infinite, and yet it has increased:

"No winter shall abate the sring's increase."


He deals with the problem of body and soul in "The Anniversarie" of the individual and the universe in "The Sunne Rising" and of deprivation and actuality in "A Noctrunall". In his divine poems he talks about the Crucification, ransom, sects / schism, religion, etc.

Donne is a coterie poet. He rejects the Patrarchan tradition of poetry, adopted by the Elizabethans. The Elizabethan poetry was the product off emotions. He rejected platonic idealism, elaborate description and ornamentation. He was precise and concentrated in poetry while the Elizabethan are copious and plentiful in words.

Seventeenth century had four major prerequisites; colloquial in diction, personal in tone, logical in structure and undecorative and untraditional imagination, which were also present in Donne.

To conclude, he is more a seventeenth century poet than a metaphysical poet. There are some features in his poetry which differentiate him e.g. he is a monarch of with and more colloquial than any other seventeenth century poet. If other seventeenth century poet bring together emotions and intellect, he defines emotional experience with intellectual parallels etc. Still he writes in the tradition of the seventeenth century poets.

John Donne: A love poet

Donne was the first English poet to challenge and break the supremacy of Petrarchan tradition. Though at times he adopts the Petrarchan devices, yet his imagery and rhythm, texture and colour of his love poetry is different. There are three distinct strains of his love poetry – Cynical, Platonic and Conjugal love.

Giving an allusion to Donne's originality as the poet of love, Grierson makes the following observation:
"His genius temperament and learning gave a certain qualities to his love poems … which arrest our attention immediately. His love poems, for instance, do have a power which is at once realistic and distracting."
Donne's greatness as a love-poet arises from the fact that this poetry covers a wider range of emotions than that of any previous poet. His poetry is not bookish but is rooted in his personal experiences. Is love experience were wide and varied and so is the emotional range of his love-poetry. He had love affairs with a number of women. Some of them were lasting and permanent, other were only of a short duration.

Donne is quite original in presenting the love situations and moods.

The "experience of love" must produce a "sense of connection" in both the lovers. This "sense of connection" must be based on equal urge and longing on both the sides.

"The room of love" must be shared equally by the two partners.

Donne magnifies the ideal of "Sense of connection" into the physical fulfillment of love.
"My face in thine eyes thine in mime appears"
This aspect of love helps him in the virtual analysis of the experience of love. Donne was a shrewd observer who had first hand knowledge of "love and related affairs. That is why in almost all his poems, he has a deep insight.

His love as expressed in his poetry was based not on conventions but on his own experiences. He experienced all phase of love – platonic, sensuous, serene, cynical, conjugal, illicit, lusty, picturesque and sensual. He could also be grotesque blending thought with passion.

Another peculiar quality of Donne's love lyrics is its "metaphysical strain". His poems are sensuous and fantastic. Donne's metaphysical strain made his reader confused his sincerity.

Donne's genius temperament and learning gave to his love poems power and fascination. There is a depth and rang of feeling unknown to the majority of Elizabethan poets. Donne's poetry is startlingly unconventional even when he dallies, half ironically, with the hyperboles of petrarch.

Donne is realistic not an idealistic. He knows the weakness of Flesh, the pleasure of sex, the joy of secret meeting. However he tries to establish a relationship between the body and the soul. Donne is very realistic poet.

Grierson distinguished three distinct strains in it. First there is the cynical strain. Secondly, there is the strain f conjugal love to be noticed in poems like "valediction: forbidding mourning". Thirdly, there is platonic strain. The platonic strain is to b found in poems like "Twicknam Garden", "The Funeral", "The Blossoms", and "The Primroses". These poems were probably addressed to the high-born lady friends. Towards them he adopts the helpless pose of flirtations and in high platonic vein boasts that:
Different of sex no more we know
Than our Guardian Angles doe
In between the cynical realistic strain and the highest spiritual strain, there are a number of poems which show an endless variety of mood and tone. Thus thee are poems in which the tone is harsh, others which are coarse and brutal, still other in which he holds out a making threat to his faithless mistress and still others in which he is in a reflective mood. More often that not, a number of strains and moods are mixed up in the same poem. This makes Donne as a love poet singularly, original, unconventional and realistic.

Whatever may be the tone or mood of a particular poem, it is always an expression of some personal experience and is, therefore, presented with remarkable force, sincerity and seriousness. Each poem deals with a love situation which is intellectually analyzed with the skill of an experienced lawyer.

Hence the difficult nature of his poetry and the charge of obscurity have been brought against him. The difficulty of the readers is further increased by the extreme condensation and destiny of Donne's poetry.

The fantastic nature of the metaphysical conceits and poetry would become clear even we examine a few examples. In "Valediction: Forbidden Mourning" true lovers now parted are likened to the legs of a compass. The image is elaborated at length. The lovers are spiritually one, just as the head of the compass is one even when the legs are apart. One leg remains fixed and the other moves round it. The lover cannot forget the beloved even when separated from her. The two loves meet together in the end just as the two legs of the compass are together again, as soon as circle has been drawn.

At other times, he uses equally extravagated hyperboles. For example, he mistakes his beloved to an angel, for to imagine her less than an angle would be profanity.

In Donne's poetry, there is always an "intellectual analysis" of emotion. Like a clever lawyer, Donne gives arguments after arguments in support of his points of view. Thus in "Valediction: Forbidden Mourning" he proves that true lovers need not mourn at the time of parting. In "Canonization" he establishes that lovers are saints of love and in "The Blossome" he argues against the petrarchan love tradition. In all this Donne is a realistic love poet.

John Donne Conceit

Conceit in Donne's poetry

 

Many of John Donne's poems contain metaphysical conceits and intellectual reasoning to build a deeper understanding of the speaker's emotional state. A conceit can be defined as an extended, unconventional metaphor between objects that appear to be unrelated. Metaphysical conceit is a highly ingenious kind of conceit widely used by the metaphysical poets. It often exploits verbal logic to the point of the grotesque and sometimes creates such extravagant turns on meaning that they become absurd. The metaphysical conceit is characteristic of seventeenth century writers influence by John Donne, and became popular again in this century after the revival of the metaphysical poets. However, Donne is exceptionally good at creating unusual unions between different elements in order to illustrate his point and form a persuasive argument in his poems.

 

By using metaphysical conceits in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", Donne attempts to convince his beloved (presumably his wife) that parting is a positive experience which should not be looked upon with sadness. In the first stanza, Donne compares the speaker's departure to the mild death of virtuous men who pass on so peacefully that their loved ones find it difficult to detect the exact moment of their death. Their separation must be a calm transition like this form of death which Donne describes. The poet writes,

 

"Let us melt, and make no noise"

 

Then we find another example of conceit which was not found in any poems of any poets before. Here he compares the two lovers to the pair of legs of compass. Like the compass they have one central point (love) and two sides (bodies) which note in a circle. Here he says,

 

"If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two,

Thy soule the fix foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the 'other doe"

 

Similarly, in the poem, "The Good-Morrow", we find some startling and shocking or fantastic conceits which had never before found. Here he says, the lover is a whole world to his beloved and she is a whole world to him, not only that they are two better hemispheres who constitute the whole world. Here the poet says,

 

"Where can we finde two better hemispheres,

Without sharpe North, without declining West?"

 

Again he says that as the four elements, earth, air, fire and water were supposed to combine to form new substance, so two souls mix to form a new unity. The strength and durability of this new unit is dependent upon how well the elements of the two souls are balanced, as we see from these lines from The Good-Morrow:

 

What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;

It our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

 

In the poem "The sunne Rising" there are a lot of conceits in almost every stanza. The poet says that the lover can eclipse and cloud the sun with a wink . He says,

 

"I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke"

 

Again he says that the beloved lying in the bed by the lover's side is to his both west and East Indies; the beloved is all states and the lover is all princes. He says,

 

She's all states, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is"

 

In the poem, "The Canonization", we find the use of conceit. Organic imagery is a strong point of this poem. In the second stanza, the poet says,

 

"Alas, alas. who's injur'd by my love?

What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?"

 

The poet assumes that a lover. ship have the power to drown ships, that his tears may flood the grounds, that his "colds" may bring about the season of winter, and that his "heats" may bed to the list of deaths by plague. (These are all fantastic hyperboles. The poet is, of course, mocking at the Petrarchan exaggeration). Then he says,

 

"We' are Tapers too and at our own cost die"

 

The beloved is one fly, the lover is another fly. And they are tapers too. In then are to be found the Eagle and the Dove. They provide a clue to the riddle of the phoenix because they are one representing both sexes. These are all fantastic conceits.

 

In the poem "The Extasie", we find conceits. Here he says that the souls of the lovers have left their bodies temporarily and are communicating with each other (like two armies facing each other). And the images of the two lovers in each other's eyes are regarded as the lovers "propagation" or the issue which they have produced. And the two souls of the lovers have become one and the resultant soul is abler or finer than each taken singly. Moreover, the bodies are spheres, and the lovers' minds or souls the intelligences which move the sphere.

 

In the poem "The Flea", we find another use of conceit where the Flea is thought to be their marriage temple as well as their marriage bed because it sucks a tiny drop of blood from the lover's and the beloved's body. And according to the poet it means that they two have got married. Here he says,

 

"Marke but this flea ,and marke in this,

Low little that which thou deny'st me is;

Mee it suck'd first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;"

 

The killing of the flea will mean destroying three lives- those of the poet, his beloved and the insect. It will also be an act of sacrilege because a temple will be destroyed. He says that the beloved should surrender her body to the poet because she will, by doing so, lose just as little honour as the life she has lost by a drop of her blood having been sucked by the flea.

 

In summing up we can say that John Donne's poetry is abound with metaphysical conceits. Conceits are the effortless creation of John Donne. To him, conceits come to his poetry as leaves come to the tree. And for the use of conceits he stands supreme and mostly for such uses of conceit, he becomes the best metaphysical poet.