2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

The Sun Rising

‘The Sun Rising’, unlike the previous poems, could be read as a subtle combination of Donne’s expressions on love and sex. The poem addresses the inner monologue of a lover when awoken by the Sun. Despite the initial tones of a love poem, the narrator takes a mocking tone when addressing the Sun, personifying it as a “busy old fool”. This mocking tone and use of harsh language shows an attempt to shadow the narrator’s grandiose and exaggerated images of his lover, leaving a possibility that the narrator is trying to hide his actual obsession with this woman, “If her eyes have not blinded thine”. Donne further evolves this by framing his love to this woman as divine, as such, it can be metaphorically true that their divine love has greater importance than the rest of the world. Such an extreme comparison leads us to see a spiritual metaphor in the poem. As strong as the Sun’s light is, it pales in comparison to the spiritual light that shines from the divine and which brings man to love the divine (Walker 2015). Donne continues this theme of divinity by continuously representing his lover as “the world”. As such, if she represents “the world” because God does, then Donne by proxy, is placing himself in the position of God for loving this woman. Whilst now sounding along the same lines as ‘The Good Morrow’, this poem does not commit to the full exaggerations of love as the previous poem, leading the readers to believe that this poem has more sentiment and is more of a middle ground on where Donne expresses the actual sentiments of love, half exaggerating and salacious and half pure affection. This poem places the concepts of sex, love and gender on a completely different scale from the other poems. The femininity within ‘The Sun Rising’ is embraced, expressing and comparing this ‘female’ trait of being emotional as wholeheartedly divine, unlike in the other poems. However, the narrator is still

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