Katarzyna Rutkowska, gr. 1

Commentary of 'Sun rising' by John Donne

The poem 'Sun rising' written by John Donne is a kind of monologue in which the speaker adresses the sun. The speaker is probably a male who is lying next to his female lover:

But that I would not lose her sight so long.[1]

The poem is focused around the lovers' bed. The most important thing in this poem is addressee of the monologue – the personificated sun. The symbolic meaning of the sun is being intruder who disturbs two people in the morning.

The first stanza

The poem is opened by an apostrophe to the personificated sun:

'Busy old fool, unruly Sun (…)'.

The sun is considered to be an old person. This person is also unruly, because of disturbing the lovers in their room by showing up behind the curtains. Reading from the undertone of this poem we can guess that the sun is a real busybody who pokes his nose into two lovers' affairs. That is why the speaker goes further in insulting the sun:

'Saucy pedantic wretch (...)'

All this insults allows the readers to feel the speaker's attitude towards the sun. Starting with this words the speaker is telling the sun to go back to his daily activities, like waking up students to school or telling king's hunters that it is time for hunting. In the 8th line the speaker used a metaphore:

'Call country ants to harvest offices;'

These 'contry ants' are people, probably peasants who works on the field as hard as small, black insects. The peasents start they work with the sun rising and end it with sunset. The readers can assume that their place of work is a field, because word 'harvest' is used and it has connections with work on the land. Two last lines of the first stanza refers to love which does not follow the rules of right time and right place. Time doesn't exist for love and there is no appropriate season, nor