13 John Donne: The Sun Rising

Mr. Rakesh Ramamoorthy

Introduction 

John Donne is perhaps the most well-known non-dramatic poet of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Donne is nothing if not complex and for a nuanced understanding of his work, one needs to be aware of the various religious, socio-political and literary contexts from which they have emerged. This lesson will briefly explain these contexts and then go on to provide a detailed analysis of the poem “The Sun Rising”.

Life and Background

A brief look at Donne’s life would be in order: He was born in 1572 into a Catholic family. Now, that is something that is worth emphasizing: Donne was born a Catholic in a nation that was predominantly Anglican (the context here is of course, the English Reformation) which, as will be explained below, made him something of an outsider during the early years of his life. Donne had illustrious ancestors: His mother was the daughter of the playwright John Heywood and was a descendant of Sir Thomas More himself who was beheaded because he steadfastly held onto Catholicism and refused to accept King Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England. Donne’s Catholic faith caused him difficulties in his early life. He attended both Oxford and Cambridge but he did not take a degree from either university because that would have required him to take the oath of allegiance to the monarch and thus relinquish Catholicism. After taking a short break from his studies to travel to Spain and Italy, he studied law at Thavies Inn (1591) and then at Lincoln’s Inn (1592–94). This should explain the preponderance of legal metaphors in his poetry. Eventually Donne did convert to Protestantism; there are no exact dates available but many scholars date the conversion c.1593. Given this background, it is only to be expected that Donne’s writings would reflect this religious turmoil and they do. Thus critics such as AchsahGuibbory have noted that even though his poetry seems to endorse the Protestant version of Christianity, some Catholic influences are visible in his poetry. For instance, the poem “Airs and Angels” has the speaker worshipping his lover as an angel even though the Reformation had rejected the worship of angels. Interpretation of such poems has become complicated as it is impossible to accurately date those poems and hence it is not known whether they were written before or after Donne’s conversion. At the same time his later prose writings reveal a radically different position: His Psuedo-Martyr (1610) is critical of the Catholics who had refused to swear the Oath of Allegiance to the King.

In 1597, Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was elected an MP, and seemed all set for a bright career at the court; but in 1601 he eloped with Anne More, Sir Egerton’s niece and thus fell into disfavor with both his employer and with the royal establishment in general. For the next decade, Donne lived in poverty and had to depend on the generosity of friends and patrons. One such patron was Sir Robert Drury whose deceased daughter Elizabeth was celebrated in Donne’s Anniversaries. The King steadfastly refused to appoint Donne to a post at his court and maintained that Donne should enter the Church which he eventually did in 1615. He was appointed to the prestigious position of the Dean of the St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621 and he gradually became the most well-known preacher of his time. He died of stomach cancer in 1631.

Donne’s Works & the Major Themes 

Now,  let  us  turn  to  Donne’s  works.  None  of  Donne’s  poetic  works  –  other  than Anniversaries – were published during his lifetime and hence it is difficult to date his works. It is widely believed that during the 1590s, he wrote his satires (which are indebted to Juvenal and Horace as well as the English satirists of the 1590s) in which he makes fun of a wide range of people including Puritans, courtiers, corrupt politicians and licentious women. His “elegies” (mostly love poems and not mourning poems) belong to the same period and they are indebted to Ovid. His Songs and Sonnetsconsists of 53 poems dealing with diverse themes. Anniversaries – written as elegies lamenting the death of Elizabeth Drury, the daughter of his patron Sir Robert Drury – were the only poetical works of Donne to be published during his lifetime. After Donne’s death, two major editions of his poetry appeared: the first in 1633 and the second in 1635. It should be remembered that Donne was also a prose writer of some importance. His major prose writings include Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623) and his published sermons, the most famous of the latter is “Death’s Duell”.

Donne’s poetry mostly revolves around three themes: religion; erotic love; and travel, exploration and colonialism. His Elegies are mostly love poems and his Holy Sonnets deal with religion. But with Donne, these boundaries are very porous. His religious poetry can have erotic imagery. The best example is the Holy Sonnet XIV in which the narrator addresses God and laments that he is “betrothed” to God’s enemy (which can be seen as a reference to either the everyday world or the Satan). He announces that he cannot be “chaste” unless he is “ravished” by God. Alternately one can think of “The Canonization” in which the speaker wants him and his beloved to be “canonized for love”. In his erotic poetry, the man-woman relationships are often expressed in imagery that evokes colonial conquest. This can be best explained by briefly discussing a few lines from his “To His Mistress Going to Bed”,

License my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

These lines are obviously part of an erotic poem in which the speaker is addressing his mistress and seeking her permission to caress her body. Here, the woman’s body is likened to America (Remember that America was ‘discovered by Columbus in 1492 and was a popular destination of European explorers throughout the 16th century. Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement or colony in America was established in 1607). The rhetoric of colonial domination is taken further when the man claims sovereignty over the woman’s body and his physical exploration of her body is likened to the quest for riches. This merging of two apparently diverse worldviews (that of love, and that of travel, discovery and colonialism) is typical of Donne’s poetry. Before explaining the poem itself, we must discuss the form most commonly associated with Donne’s poetry, which is of course, “Metaphysical Poetry”.

Metaphysical Poetry

The label “metaphysical poetry” is commonly attached to the poetry of Donne and other seventeenth century poets such as George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, and Thomas Traherne. What are the characteristics of Metaphysical poetry? It is the poetry of “wit”, in the seventeenth century sense of wit which meant the ability to see similarity between radically different things. The metaphysical poets displayed their wit through the use of conceits. Chris Baldick defines the conceit as, “an unusually far-fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feelings”. Conceits often employ such devices as hyperbole (exaggeration) and paradox. The most common example of a metaphysical conceit is Donne’s comparison of lovers to two arms of a compass in his “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”. While the comparison seems far-fetched, it does make sense: Donne explains that just like the two legs of a compass are connected to each other even when they separate, lovers do not ever really move apart from each other. Metaphysical poetry mostly dealt with themes of religion and love. As opposed to the mellifluous Elizabethan lyric, metaphysical poets adopt a colloquial, often argumentative tone. For instance Donne’s “The Canonization” opens with the line, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love”. This style will be discussed further below while explicating the “The Sun Rising”.

Now, while the idea of metaphysical poetry is useful in reading the poetry of Donne and others, it should be used with caution. For one, these poems are not more “metaphysical” or philosophical than other poems of the period. Even their ornate style is common in the baroque poetry of Europe and some critics prefer to use the term “baroque” to characterize Donne. So when we use the term metaphysical poetry, we should keep in mind that we are dealing with poetry of wit and not poems that are literally, “metaphysical”. Moreover, the characteristics attributed to the metaphysical poets do not apply in equal measure to all these poets. So it is far more useful to understand “metaphysical poets” as a loose label and to specify the characteristics of the particular poet’s works.

The term “metaphysical poetry” itself has its origin in disparaging remarks made by Dryden and others in the seventeenth century, who criticized these poets for trying to display their learning (or “metaphysicks”) in their poem. Even Samuel Johnson, who first suggested that these poets can be together seen as metaphysical poets criticized them for trying to show off their learning in their poetry and for the lack of “feeling” in their poetry. Johnson famously commented that in their poetry, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. While Johnson said this disparagingly, this ‘witty’ (remember the sense of wit explained above) fusion of diverse subjects is a key feature of Donne’s poetry .Thus the early uses of the term “metaphysical poetry” were derogatory but the reputation of this school was restored in the twentieth century with the appearance of H. J. C. Grierson’s influential anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921). T.S. Eliot in his famous essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) – originally a review of this anthology – argued that these poets display a unification of thought and feeling as opposed to the “dissociation of sensibility” which affected English poetry of the later ages. More importantly, Eliot also admired Donne and the other metaphysicals for their exploration of complex psychological states, a feature that he felt linked these poets to the twentieth century modernists. That is an insight worth keeping in mind while reading “The Sun Rising”.

Explication of John Donne’s ‘“The Sun Rising”

Donne’s “The Sun Rising” is a love lyric. More specifically, it is an “aubade”, a poem in which lovers complain about having to part at dawn and it is well established that it is indebted to Ovid’s aubade , “O Aurora”. In “Sun Rising”, we have a male speaker addressing the Sun and chiding him for disturbing the lovers. While reading this poem, we should keep the following questions in mind:

• How do we ‘place’ this poem among the other love lyrics of Donne?

• Is the speaker’s argument linear? Or does it take swift turns?

• What are the religious and socio-political allusions in the poem?

Stanza 1

Now, let us turn to the poem itself:

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?

Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

While reading Donne, it is always useful to try reading him aloud. The first thing that will strike one is something I have already touched upon: the conversational, argumentative tone that sets his poetry apart from the more musical poetry of the other Elizabethans. This is a key point because this tone is one of the defining features of much of Donne’s poetry. His poems often begin with a question or stern command. I have already mentioned the opening line of “The Canonization”. Another example would be “The Good Morrow” which opens with the speaker wondering:

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved?

Or one can think of Holy Sonnet XIV which opens with a supplication:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God

Donne’s use of the conversational tone in poetry was a major influence on Modernist poetry, especially T.S. Eliot. In fact, one only needs to read the abrupt invitation with which “The LoveSong of J.Alfred Prufrock” (“Let us go then, you and I”) opens to see the similarity.

The meaning of the lines is, of course, simple. The speaker is scolding the sun for dawning and thus disturbing the lovers who have presumably been making love. The sun is “busy” as opposed to the lovers who are relaxed and unconcerned about time. “Old fool” can be interpreted in two ways and both are relevant here: In spoken language, “old” can be an adjective indicating “contempt”, as in “silly fool”. It can also indicate affection and familiarity but clearly that is not the sense intended here. The sun is an “old fool” in the literal sense as well. The sun is literally millions of years old as opposed to the young energetic lovers. Thus the sun is cast as a parental figure, an old person who is spoiling the lovers’ fun by disrupting it. But that is just one side of the web the speaker is spinning. While the sun is an “old fool”, he is also “unruly”. “Unruly” means “difficult to control and discipline” and is usually used to describe children. Thus the sun is not a wise old man; he is immature and child-like, perhaps a cranky old man who is in his second childhood. The sunlight entering a room through windows and curtains is poetically transformed into the disruption of love by an eccentric authority figure. The indignant question, “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” is ironic, as scientifically, everybody’s seasons – not just the lovers’ seasons – are determined by the sun’s movements. The evocation  of the sun as a parental authority figure makes sense as in this line, the speaker is passionately challenging the sun like a rebellious teenager challenges his parent!

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 ;

“Pedantic” means to be excessively concerned with rules and details, and thus the portrayal of the sun as an aged authority figure and a ‘spoil-sport’ continues. The sun is not just a “pedantic wretch”, he is a “saucy pedantic wretch”. “Saucy” means “cheeky” and is used to describe somebody who is impolite to his/her superiors. Thus as in the previous lines, the sun is cast both as an authority figure and as a child-like character. The sun is directed to satisfy himself by scolding insignificant people such as schoolboys who are late for school and apprentices who are “sour” or disappointed with their lot in life. In colloquial language, the message is “You may throw your weight around with such people but do not mess with us”. The next two lines contain political allusions. The reference to the King is usually taken to mean King James I who was very passionate about hunting. Thus, the speaker is asking the sun to go and alert the courtiers who are part of the King’s hunting team (“court-huntsmen”) that the King is ready to go hunting and the next line’s reference to ants being summoned to the task (“office”) of harvesting is a metaphorical reference to the sun hastening ordinary people to do their menial, daily tasks. But “court-huntsmen” may also signify the courtiers who are hunting for high positions by accompanying King James on his hunts. So the next line may be suggesting that those courtiers (metaphorically described as “country ants”) can be called to harvest (here harvest is a verb meaning “to collect”) offices or positions. This jibe at the office-hunters is significant because, Donne himself had tried to win a secular appointment from the King for a long time. In either case, he is telling the sun to go and be a time-keeper for the hum-drum routine at court and not disturb the lovers. (As an aside, it is worth mentioning that this reference to King James’ court sets “The Sun Rising” apart from the other love lyrics in Songs and Sonnets because most of them are devoid of any reference to place or the age in which the ‘action’ takes place). In the final couplet of the stanza, the speaker announces that all the love in the world is similar in that it does not note the passage of seasons, the accompanying climactic changes or even such things as hours and days and months which are the “rags” or fragments of time. Whichever way we  choose to interpret lines 7-8, what we have seen in this stanza is a statement of the central theme of this poem which is the tussle between the materialistic world which is governed by time and is concerned about money, positions etc and the private world of mutual love which is supposedly above all such material concerns. The sun – being the harbinger of time – is crucial to the everyday ‘public’ world as commerce, government etc are all bound by time. The first stanza has laid out the conflict between the public, materialistic world of which the sun is a part, and the private ‘non-materialistic’ love and argues that the latter is immune to the rules and conventions of the former.

Stanza 2

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.

The next stanza opens with the speaker asking the sun: Why do you think that your rays are so powerful? He then goes on to make a rather cheeky claim: I can shut out your rays by just  closing my eyes. Actually, I would have done just that if it were not for the fact that I am reluctant to lose sight of my beloved even for that one moment! Here we have two hyperboles appearing in quick succession: The very claim that the speaker can eclipse the sun with a wink is of course the first one. The proviso that he would have done just that but he does not want to lose sight of his lady love even for that one moment is yet another instance of exaggeration. Now, the first trope is worth pondering upon. How convincing is that claim? Let us put a pin on that for the moment and I will address it at the end of the lesson.

If her eyes have not blinded thine

Look, and to-morrow late tell me,

Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou left’st 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.”

The speaker follows this up with another conceit: If your eyes have not been blinded by the power of her eyes, check during your journey and inform me whether India and West Indies are still there where you left them or whether they are all here with me in my bed in the form of my beloved. First of all, the speaker has suggested that there is a possibility that the sun, whose rays are strong enough to blind people, could have been blinded by his lovers’ eyes! This is a hyperbolic celebration of his lover’s beauty. The reference, “Indias of spice and mine” needs explanation: As I have already mentioned with reference to the occupation of America, the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries – Donne’s lifetime – were a period of intensive maritime travel and exploration for the British and mark the formative stages of the British Empire. The writers of the age were fascinated by the East and by Africa and their writings often reflected the contemporary interest in other parts of the globe. One example would be the reference to the “Indian Ganges” in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”. India was a source of spice and West Indies of gold (hence the reference to ‘mines’) and it is suggested that both those regions have shifted to the speaker’s bed and are perhaps personified by his lady love (the suggestion that the Indias “lie here with me”). Keep in mind that this is not just a beautiful, innocent image. The use of a particular kind of image always reveals the writers’ mindset. Here, the reference to travel and exploration reveals that like many other people of his time, the writer was interested in the other parts of the world and was fascinated by the possibility of him (or his country) possessing those regions! Anyone who is familiar with the basics of Postcolonial Studies would know that such an interest in other regions – albeit purely at the level of fantasy and imagination – led to a more concrete imperialist project later on. Anyway, the narrator implies that all the wider world (the public world of commerce, trade and governance with which the private world of love was contrasted in the previous stanza) is encapsulated within his lover. Note that the reference to the spices and gold from India and West Indies makes it very clear that the world of commerce is entering the world of love here. He claims that if the sun enquired for the various Kings that he had seen the previous day, he will be informed that all of them now lie in the lover’s bed. What we see here is a swift turn in the argument: If the previous stanza argued that the private world of the lovers is distinct from and immune to the influences of the materialistic, external world, this stanza claims that the lover’s bed is the world.

Stanza 3

She’s all states, and all princes I ;

Nothing else is ;

Princes do but play us ; compared to this,

All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.

The third and final stanza continues this line of argument and announces unambiguously that his lover embodies all the countries in the world and that he constitutes all the princes. Here there is problematic merging of the rhetoric of love with the rhetoric of political domination (The strategy used here is similar to the one in “To His Mistress Going to Bed”). The woman here stands for all the countries and the man stands for the princes who control the countries (Critics such as Ilona Bell have noted that there are strains of misogyny in Donne’s love poetry). The speaker goes on to announce that only the lovers exist (“Nothing else is”). Rather than the lovers representing the princes, the princes supposedly just imitate the lovers. When compared to their love, all the honour in the world is a mere imitation and all the wealth is unreal (alchemy refers to a metallic substance imitating gold). Here, Donne could be playing on the common association between the sun’s rays and alchemy in Renaissance writings; but whereas poets usually evoke the metaphor to poetically suggest that the sun has the power to turn base metals to gold, here alchemy is a fraudulent science and the comparison renders the sun’s authority spurious. In any case, the speaker is asserting that all the wealth and honour that the sun used to oversee is just a pale reflection of the true wealth that now exists in the lovers’ bedroom. The first half of the final stanza builds upon the trope initiated in the previous stanza and argues that not only is the whole universe contained within the lover’s world, but also everything that exists outside is a mere illusion.

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

The speaker continues with the disingenuous claim that the whole universe has now shrunk to his bedroom and he says that this contraction (in the sense of “shortening”) should make the sun at least half as happy as the lovers are because sun’s duty is to warm the world by shining across all of it and now in his old age, he only has to shine upon the lovers. There is again a continuation of the poem’s projection of the sun as someone who is old and weak rather than as the source of all energy in the universe. Here Donne is working with a Ptolemaic vision of the world which believed that the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way round. Also note that rather than presenting the sun as the master and King of the universe, the implication is that the sun is some sort of a servant who has a chore (ie. “to warm the world” ). There is also a legal pun in the word “contract”. He could also be saying that the sun will be happy that the universe has entered into a legal arrangement (or “contract”) wherein the sun does not have to circle the whole world; he can just circle the lovers’ bed. From asking the sun to leave them alone in the first stanza, the speaker has gone to inviting the sun to revolve around their bed and warm them. It is of course possible to see a sexual connotation in the suggestion that sun should “warm” the lovers in their bed: Instead of overseeing the varied businesses and affairs of the world, the sun’s duty is to now aid the lovers in their love making. It is worth repeating that the distinction that the speaker made between the materialistic world and the private, non-materialistic world of love has now completely collapsed. Rather than claiming that the lovers are sealed off from the world, now the contention is that they are the world.

So how can we sum up our reading of “The Sun Rising”? T.S. Eliot has argued that in Donne’s poetry, the sensibilities are unified, that is intellect and emotions go hand in hand without being afflicted by what he calls “the dissociation of sensibility”. At the same time, critics such as R.T. Jones have argued that Donne’s poetry displays a tension between thought (reason) and feelings (emotion). In the case of this poem at least, the latter observation seems to be more accurate. One term that is frequently used to describe Donne’s love lyrics is the sense of ‘immediacy’ that they convey. That is, the speakers manage to make the moment come alive with dramatic tension. Thus in “The Flea”, we find the speaker trying to seduce his lover with  the support of ingenuous arguments. Her actions (such as killing the flea) are reported live, as are his reactions to them. This holds true for “The Sun Rising” as the narrator expresses his instant irritation when he spies the sunlight creeping in through the windows and then goes on to record the twists and turns in his thought process. One can argue that the very point of the poem is to present this thought process in which the speaker is juggling the emotional and rational aspects of his mind. The poem begins with the speaker’s feeling that the lovers’ world is immune to time, commerce etc. But throughout the poem, the awareness that this idea of the lover’s world as an autonomous sphere is an illusion haunts the speaker. When he asks “Must to thy motions lover’s seasons run?”, the readers can simultaneously interpret it in two contradictory ways. The reader will know that the logical answer is “yes” (as we discussed earlier, scientifically, everybody’s seasons must run according to the sun’s motions). But they would also be aware that the speaker would like to believe, at least for the moment, that he can live outside the “rags of time”. I had earlier raised a question regarding the credibility of the speaker’s claim that he can shut out the sun’s beams with a wink. I was hinting at the fact that the speaker closing his eyes would have really not undermined the sun’s authority. All it would have done is to give him the illusion that he has managed to do so. The speaker is aware of that because in this very stanza he asks the sun to report something to him “tomorrow” wherein he is tacitly accepting that even he is bound by the “rags of time”. Now, we can connect this to the trope that we identified in the second stanza: If in the first stanza, the speaker’s feeling prevails over his thought and he manages to sustain the impression that lovers occupy an autonomous sphere, in the second stanza reason seems to slowly gain the upper hand. The first part of the second stanza makes an assertion that is hardly credible and then he goes on to change his strategy and argues that the lover’s world contains the rest of the world within it. Thus rather than uniting thought and feeling, here Donne is using the poem to think through the tension between the two. My point here is rather than assuming that Donne’s poetry has a well-defined ‘message’ to communicate, it is more worthwhile to look at the poem as a complex thought process. Ultimately, one can conclude that the poem begins by voicing one impression (that lovers live in a separate sphere from the rest of the world) and ends by expressing one that is equally subjective (that the world of mutual love contains the whole world). The tension that runs throughout the poem is not resolved at the end as some readers will doubtless interpret the ending as yet another wistful claim that need not be taken seriously. Our discussion of this poem makes it clear that Eliot’s observation that metaphysical poets deal with complex psychological states of mind is absolutely correct!

The tension between the world of love and that of everyday business and commerce is  not unique to this poem. Donne has made that distinction in both “The Good-Morrow” and “The Canonization”. But the way he has developed the theme is different: In “The Good-Morrow”, he argues that love is eternal and true lovers can never die as they merge into each other’s being and hence cannot be destroyed. “The Canonization” seeks to turn the lovers into immortal saints of love through the poem itself. Even though “The Sun Rising” seems to suggest that love cannot  be destroyed, it is not a poem that seeks to immortalize love through the art of poetry itself or through procreation (as we find in many Elizabethan love poems). This is a love poem that seeks to anoint love as the most important thing in the world but chooses to do so through hyperbolic claims rather than offer a ‘means’ through which this can be achieved.

“The Sun Rising” is one of Donne’s neo—Ovidian love lyrics. Donne’s love poetry has been influenced by two diverse traditions: the Petrarchan tradition and the Ovidean tradition. Unlike the Petrarchan love poetry, in which the mistress is chaste and pure, the Ovidean love poems are explicitly erotic. “The Sun Rising” obviously belong to the latter category as the reference to the lover’s bed suggests that the love represented here involves a physical relationship as well. At the same time, even though the love involves sexual contact, this is not a seduction poem like “The Flea”.

Before concluding, we should note that the poem fuses two of Donne’s major concerns: erotic love; and travel and exploration. The religious aspect – which permeates almost all of Donne’s poetry – seems to be nearly absent here. There have been attempts to detect religious references in the poem (see the piece by Mary Allen Rickey in the “Further Reading” section) but the poem remains secular. It should also be remembered that a poet as complex as Donne cannot ever be pinned down to a fixed reading. Whoever reads the poem at a deeper level and reads around it, will find delightful ways to further complicate his/her understanding of the poem. The “Further Reading” and “Exercises” sections will be of use to such adventurous readers!

Summing Up

•  The speaker initially asserts that the world of lovers is cut off from the external world. He finishes the poem by arguing that the lover’s world contains the whole
•  The poem is best read as a complex thought process which displays the tension between thought and feeling rather than as something that conveys a ‘message’.

Reference

• Corns, Thomas N. A History of Seventeenth-century English Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Print.
• Eliot. T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets”.  Vincent B. Leitch Ed. The Norton Anthology  of Theory and Criticism.1098-1105. Print.
• Guibbory, Achsah. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.
• Johnson, Samuel. “From The Lives of the English Poets: From Cowley:[On Metaphysical Wit].” Vincent B. Leitch Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.480- 482. Print.
• Jones, R.t. “John Donne’s ‘Songs AndSonets’: The Poetic Value Of Argument.”Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 51 (1978): 33-42. Web.
• Kolin, Philip C. “Love’s Wealth in ‘The Sunne Rising’”. The South Central Bulletin43.4 (1983) : 112-114. Web.
• MacFaul, Tom. “Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’ And Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’”. Notes & Queries 54.1 (2007): 37-38. Web.
• Rickey, Mary Ellen. “Donne’s the Sunne Rising, Lines 19-20”. The Explicator 48.4 (1990): 241-243. Web.
• Smith, A.J. Ed. John Donne: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1983. Print.