She Stoops to Conquer

In his poem “The Sun Rising,” John Donne uses personification of the sun, anti-courtier rhetoric, and metaphysical conceit to express love’s ability to transcend earthly conditions and position lovers at the center of the universe.

The poem opens with the speaker deriding the sun for interrupting his morning with his lover. He addresses the sun as a nosy old man, saying, “Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus… / Saucy pedantic wretch,” (665, 1-5). The sun, which in most traditions is variously symbolic of power, monarchy, and divinity, is here reduced to a very earthly and lowly state, contrary to his usual place among the heavens. Through the speaker’s personification of him, the sun is transformed from a noble celestial body to one who not only lacks authority, but is “unruly” and “saucy.” Both qualities imply his inferior status, but also his defiant, and thereby ignoble, countenance. The speaker goes on to tell the sun, “Go chide / Late school-boys and sour prentices /…love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time,” (665, 5-10). After relegating the sun to the position of a lowly fool, the speaker tells him that he lacks jurisdiction over him and his lover. Though the sun governs all the world’s inhabitants, directing them when to sleep, wake, and work, the lovers alone refuse to submit to his rule. Hours and days hold no significance for them, and are referred to as the “rags of time,” which diminishes the sun’s status yet again to that of pauper, and makes the lovers rich in comparison. As a result of the power of their love, they require no governance but their own. While the rest of the world answers to the sun’s will, the two lovers, without the necessity of ...

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...minates in his declaration that he and his lover are the whole world. He informs the sun that he can fulfill his duty of warming the world by staying to warm them, because they encompass the world. The sun is left to orbit the lovers’ bed. The state of being in love has lead the couple to supercede all the princes in the world and to master its vast well, and establishes them as the heart of the universe.

As a result of their impassioned love, the poem’s speaker and his lover transcend material constraints and the limitations of their low rank, as well feeling that they are at the center of the universe. Donne’s personification of the sun, his use of anti-courtier rhetoric that expands on the anti-authoritative sentiment directed at the sun, and his metaphysical conceit that raises the lovers above nobility and wealth, all reveal the transcendent quality of love.