Previous Next

The Sun

The primary symbol in the poem is the sun, which the speaker addresses throughout. On the most basic level, the sun is symbolically associated with light and warmth, both of which are necessary for sustaining life. More abstractly, the sun’s capacity for illumination is symbolically linked to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. The sun’s radiance further connects it to the discipline of alchemy, and particularly to the symbolism of gold. Renaissance alchemists exalted the purity of gold and associated it with the most refined forms of matter—that is, the spiritual “matter” of the mind and the soul. The sun’s golden hue marks it as similarly refined and pure. Finally, the sun is a symbolic arbiter of time. In the Ptolemaic astronomy of Donne’s era, the sun was thought to revolve around the earth. However factually incorrect, the sun’s movements nonetheless accounted for the very real phenomena of night, day, and the seasons. Taken together, these various resonances invest the sun with great symbolic power. This is precisely the power the speaker wishes, in his humorously grumpy way, to challenge. As he insists in the opening stanza, it’s love—and not the sun—that holds all the power in the context of his bedroom (lines 9–10):

     Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
     Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

The Speaker’s Bedroom

In “The Sun Rising,” the speaker’s bedroom is a symbol with two dominant meanings. First, as a space of retreat where the lovers can be together undisturbed, the bedroom exemplifies the private sphere. As distinct from the public sphere, which is the domain of politics and society, the private sphere is the domain of love and family. Yet despite the implicit distinction between these spheres, the speaker insists that his bedroom symbolically unifies them to create a microcosm of the whole world. In this version of the world, though, matters traditionally relegated to the private sphere—here: love—take precedence over matters typically associated with the public sphere. In addition to symbolizing the all-importance of love, the bedroom is also symbolically linked to the Ptolemaic model of the universe. This model placed earth at the center, with everything else orbiting around it in a series of concentric spheres. The speaker explicitly references this model in the poem’s final lines (29–30):

     Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
     This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

By centering his bedroom in this way, the speaker issues an implicit challenge to the Ptolemaic system, which represented the earth as a morally corrupt place. The speaker, by contrast, subordinates the sun to the earth and to the pleasures of love.

Previous section Motifs Next section Tone

Take a Study Break