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“The Sun Rising” takes place at dawn in the speaker’s bedroom, where he lays with his lover. The title alerts us to the fact that the poem occurs at dawn. The opening lines also affirm this, since it’s the sun’s early-morning rays that incite the speaker’s address (lines 1–3):

               Busy old fool, unruly sun,​​​​​​​
               Why dost thou thus,
     Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

But perhaps more important than the time of day is the physical location. The speaker is addressing the sun from his bedroom. As a private sanctuary that offers refuge from the outside world, the bedroom is a space that enables the physical and emotional intimacy he shares with his lover. The speaker and his lover can thus fully relinquish themselves to their shared experience of sex and love. With nothing else to concern them, the size of their shared world shrinks to the size of this bedroom. The speaker clearly reflects this idea of the bedroom-as-microcosm in the third stanza (lines 25–30):

               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.

With the world “contracted” around them, the speaker and his lover occupy the very heart of the universe—that is, their bed, which is the “center” around which the sun revolves.

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