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Love Conquers All

Perhaps the most central theme in “The Sun Rising” relates to the all-powerful nature of love. This theme is implicit from the poem’s very beginning, where the speaker grows irritated at the sun for its interruption of what he deems more important: the time he’s spending with his lover. The speaker’s irritation doesn’t last. Before long, his annoyance turns into a rhetorical game of one-upmanship in which he asserts his dominance over the sun. The speaker’s mood of joyful arrogance is made possible by the sense of confidence he derives from his relationship. He indicates as much in the second stanza. There, he claims that he “could eclipse and cloud” the sun’s beams “with a wink” (line 12). If the speaker does indeed have the power to overshadow the sun, he clearly gets it from his lover, who possesses an even more formidable gaze that could outshine the sun and even leave it “blinded” (line 15). As the speaker continues with his monologue, his sense of power continues to inflate. By the end, he claims that his lover is a symbolic amalgamation of “all states,” which makes him a manifestation of “all princes” (line 21)—and hence the ruler of all realms.

Metaphysics Eclipses Physics

The speaker insists that love takes precedence over the machinations of the natural world, and in doing so he demonstrates the dominance of metaphysics over physics. Here, physics may be understood in terms of the physical laws of nature, represented in the poem by the sun. In the opening stanza, the speaker references the sun’s celestial “motions” (line 4), which not only account for the division between day and night, but also for the changing of the seasons. The sun’s physical movements through the cosmos are therefore responsible for all the key divisions of time here on earth. Yet the speaker rejects the sun and its timekeeping capacity. He even goes so far as to call the sun a “pedantic wretch” (line 5), implying that this celestial body is overly scrupulous in its adherence to mundane patterns of time. By contrast, the speaker insists that love transcends the kind of time kept by the sun’s physical movements (lines 9–10):

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

Unconstrained by the natural physics of time, love is more-than-physical—which is to say, it’s metaphysical. And if, as the speaker claims, love is ultimately more powerful than the sun, then metaphysics eclipses physics.

The Sanctity of the Earth

In Donne’s lifetime, the dominant model of the universe was still the Ptolemaic model. Ptolemy situated the earth at the center of the cosmos, nested inside a concentric series of spheres. These spheres defined the fixed orbits of all celestial bodies, beginning with the moon, the sun, and the nearby planets, and continuing to the vast outer sphere of fixed stars. But the Ptolemaic model isn’t just a map of the universe’s physical structure. It’s also a blueprint of the cosmic spiritual architecture. Though it’s location at the center of the universe might indicate its primacy, the earth was in fact considered the most corruptible and impure of all the spheres. Only in the outer, more ethereal spheres did the universe approach spiritual perfection. Curiously, even as he references the Ptolemaic structure of the universe, the speaker of “The Sun Rising” offers an implicit challenge to its moral and spiritual architecture. He clearly revels in the physical and emotional intimacy he shares with his lover, and his celebration of love implicitly situates his bedroom into a kind of sanctuary. Hence, when the speaker explicitly frames his bedroom as a microcosm of the earth itself, he effectively sanctifies the earth.

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