to notice that the opening lines of ‘‘The Sunne
Rising’’ echo even as they transform the corre-
sponding lines of Ovid,AmoresI. xiii:
... [Already the blonde who drives the day in her
frosty carriage is coming over the ocean from her
aged husband. What’s your hurry, Aurora?
Wait!—AndsomayabirdappeaseMemnon’s
shadeeachyearwithsolemnslaughter!]
But if Donne is, in part, seeking to outdo the
wit of Ovid with his own more extravagant con-
ceits, it also seems that he may be parodying ‘‘A
Hymn to Aurora’’ of a more recent Latin poet,
Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550). The opening
of hisHymnus in Auroraoffers a picture of the
dawn goddess that contrasts sharply with Ovid’s:
... [Behold Aurora coming from the farthest
East brings round again her dewy four-horse
team and brightly bears the shining light within
her rosy bosom.]
Besides the fact thatFlaminio portrays the
Dawn’s conveyance as ‘‘dewy’’ (roscidas)rather
than ‘‘frosty’’ (pruinoso), this is an altogether more
engaging portrait of the goddess as the embodiment
of refulgence, and it seems to be a direct reply to
Ovid. The moral edification of the closing sapphics
may have especially caught Donne’s attention:
... [Without you mortals would lie buried in
eternal night, and without you things would
have no colors and life would not be enriched
with learned arts. You expel heavy sleep from
sluggish eyes—sleep is the image of death—
calling from the roof-tops you send each one
joyful to his duties. The swift traveler leaps
from the covers, the strong bullocks return to
the yoke, the happy shepherd hastens quickly
to the woods with his hurried flock. But weep-
ing the lover forsakes the bed of his darling girl
and speaks harsh words to you, torn away from
the desired embrace of his yielding mistress. Let
him love the lairs of deceitful night, let me
always rejoice in the good light: permit me,
great goddess, to receive the shining light
through the long years!]
The weeping lover who speaks harsh words
to Aurora would seem to be Flaminio’s version
of the irreverent persona of Ovid’sAmores. This
lover of dark dens and loose women is reproved
by contrast to the man who rejoices in the light
and hastens eagerly to his duties.
Donne reverts to the tone of theAmores,paint-
ing a very different scene from Flaminio’s sturdy
bullocks, eager traveler, and happy shepherd who
go off to work whistlinglike the seven dwarfs:
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King
will ride
Call countrey ants to harvest offices...
(5–8)
‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ undoubtedly celebrates
mutually fulfilling love, but the celebration takes
place in a context that recalls the limits even of
such a love. Donne would have expected his read-
ers to be aware of other claims on human time
and attention amidst this exaltation of erotic bliss
and sleeping-in. Perhaps neither the poet nor his
audience knew this particular poem by Flaminio,
but they surely knew poems or prose exhortations
like it. There is obvious humor in Donne’s mock-
ery of this kind of earnest solemnity; however,
even Ovid must have occasionally had to be
somewhere on time. Donne calls attention to the
equivocal status of the claims made in the poem
by their very extravagance. Ovid is never so brash
withAuroraas Donne is with the ‘‘Sunne,’’ which
he calls ‘‘Busie old foole’’ and ‘‘Sawcy pedantique
wretch.’’ The very excessiveness of his emulation
of Ovid and parody of Flaminio discloses the
tension between the notion of love’s sufficiency
and the civic and economic demands of the world:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both the’India’s of spice and
Myne
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here
with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st
yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one
bed lay. (15–20)
There are times when we have all believed
this, or at least wished to do so; and it is a truth
of human experience that love is finally more
important than money or power. What makes
this poem so much more than a conventional
assertion of the transcendent power of human
love is the structural irony: its subtle incorpora-
tion of the contrasting reality that love—
certainly the sort that is enacted in the lovers’
four-poster bed—is a fragile enterprise indeed
without the economic and social where-with-all
to sustain it. Cleanth Brooks did not perhaps
sufficiently allow for the way the irony is deep-
ened not only by such intertextual resonance as
is afforded by Ovid and Flaminio, but also by
our knowledge of the historical situation of John
Donne: the irony of his radical defiance of
accepted social norms is surely rendered moreSong