The Sun Rising by John Donne
Poetic Technique and Effect in Donne's Famous Love Poem
John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising" employs techniques of apostrophe and hyperbole whilst reshaping the genre of aubade. The results are passionate and exhilarating.
In The Sun Rising, John Donne’s rhetoric claims a place for him at the centre of the world, ordering around the sun itself, and insisting that nothing matters apart from his love.
The Aubade
Donne’s opens the poem with these lines;
Busy old fool, unruly sun
Why dost thou thus
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
which provide both a dramatic beginning and information to the reader as to where and when the poem is purportedly taking place. Donne is adapting the old poetic genre of aubade, the lament at dawn traditionally made by a lover who must leave his mistress. Philip Larkin wrote a masterly example entitled Aubade, and the mock-argument between Romeo and Juliet as to whether dawn has broken owes a lot to the genre. However, rather than lamenting the rising of the sun like the other poets, John Donne uses it as an opportunity to pick a fight and brag a bit.
Apostrophe
Addressing an inanimate object, or force, such as Fate, or the Earth, is a technique known as apostrophe, which stretches back to Ancient Greek poetry. Donne’s address to the sun falls somewhat short of respectful, calling it “busy old fool” and “saucy pedantic wretch”. He patronises the sun, threatening that it is within his powers to darken the sun’s beams, to “eclipse and cloud them with a wink”, and then offering sympathy for the work which the sun has to perform in giving light and warmth to the world.
Hyperbole and Subjectivity
Most of The Sun Rising’s rhetoric is conscious hyperbole; Donne makes extravagant claims regarding the important of himself and his lover such as “Sh’is all states and all princes, I/ Nothing else is.” This claim, like the earlier claim that by winking he could darken the sun, rests upon the poet pretending to mistake his own subjective viewpoint for objective reality. If he blinked, to him the sun would seem to have flickered, but of course it would have continued to shine for everyone else. The Sun Rising strikes us as powerful poetry, rather than complete nonsense, because it is an expression of the exhilaration of love, and a projection of intense internal feelings onto the external world. The poem retains its power because so many people can recognise the experience of feeling that only they and their lover matter in the whole world, and that “compared to this/ All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy”.
