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Like the speaker himself, the tone of “The Sun Rising” is joyfully arrogant. The speaker adopts this tone throughout the poem, initially with the stream of playful invective he directs at the sun, and later as he reimagines his bedroom as a microcosm of the whole world. Central to the speaker’s tone is the self-inflation he entertains in the second stanza, where he claims he “could eclipse and cloud [the sun’s beams] with a wink” (line 13). The speaker exaggerates wildly here, but his egotism comes less from a true sense of self-importance and more from the exuberant mood he shares with his lover. It’s this mood that feeds his desire to redefine the laws of nature and grant love absolute primacy, as he does in lines 9–10:

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

Echoing the speaker’s desire to rewrite the rules of nature, Donne has rewritten the rules of the sonnet form to suit his own needs. Indeed, he has creatively transformed the standalone 14-line poetic form into a series of 10-line stanzas, each with a variable meter and a hybridized rhyme structure. Written in an era when the English-language sonnet was in its prime, Donne’s joyful repurposing of the form exhibits an amusing arrogance.

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