piquant by the disastrous results of his elope-
ment with Anne More. Donne the man could
stay in bed every morning because he had no
office.
But Brooks is finally right: the irony is discern-
ible in the structure of ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’...As
evidence I offer the last stanza, which highlights
the conflicting norms of conventional society
precisely by rejecting them so outrageously.
Are the lovers lingering in their bed alienated
from the ‘‘busie’’ world to which the ‘‘unruly
Sunne’’ awakens them? It is no matter because
they not only transcend that world; they epito-
mize it:
She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchi-
mie... (21–24)
The ‘‘real world’’ thus fades before the sub-
lime bliss of the shared bed. The high-spirited
absurdity of these assertions seems so self-
evident that there hardly seems any point in
refuting Jonathan Goldberg’s assertion that
here ‘‘the speaker makes the absolutist declara-
tion toward which the entire poem tends...The
absorption of the lovers in each other, their rep-
lication of the power of the world, constitutes an
appropriation of and reversal of the language of
state secrets’’ (111). Likewise, in a generally sym-
pathetic essay, Camille Wells Slights seems to be
straining... when she defends ‘‘The Sunne Ris-
ing’’ from the charge that it ‘‘reinscribes the cul-
ture’s gender hierarchy’’ by arguing that ‘‘as
third- and first-person singular pronouns give
way to first-person plural, the topic becomes
not the lovers but their relationship’’ (78).
Carey gets closer to the mark in noticing the
tension in the conceits, but he seems altogether
oblivious to the tone: ‘‘Donne’s vaunting lan-
guage is, like all vaunting language, an expres-
sion of insecurity, and this makes the poem more
human. The pretension to kingship that he voi-
ces amounts to an acknowledgement of personal
insufficiency’’ (109). The speaker of the poem,
however, knows this as well as Professor Carey:
the ‘‘vaunting language’’ sounds like an effort to
deflect by means of laughter an anxious question
about, say, where the rent money is coming from
this month. The woman whose lover or husband
has just proclaimed his universal sovereignty
over the empire of the bedroom probably has
more concrete worries than being colonized by
the hegemony of absolutist patriarchal ideology.
At the same time, there would have been
some compensations even to genteel poverty in
the company of such a roguish wit. Most of us
are capable of stale, reassuring compliments like
‘‘I think the world of you.’’ Donne works out the
details of the cliche ́ and creates a superbly pre-
posterous conceit in which the cosmos becomes
thalamocentric:
Thou sunne art halfe as happy’ as wee,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
Thine age askes ease, and since thy
duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in
warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every
where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy
spheare. (25–30)
Ovid chides Aurora for her haste to leave
her aged husband:... [If only Tithonus were allowed to tell a tale
of you; nothing more scandalous would be told
in heaven. While you shrink from him, since he
is a long age older, early in the day you leap to
the chariot odious to the old man.]
Donne’s sly sympathy for the aging sun is a
comically inventive variation on the Ovidian
theme, and it hints at the reality of human aging,
which undermines the speaker’s jaunty erotic opti-
mism. This is a man ruefully amused at the human
limitations he so brazenly denies. Donne evidently
was able to laugh at himself,...
The vision of love in ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’ is
decidedly more affirmative than what we find in
‘‘The Bracelet.’’ Anthony Low has argued persua-
sively that the former poem marks an important
step in ‘‘the reinvention of love’’ at the threshold
of modern times whereby lovers, wedded or
otherwise, create their own private world over
against the claims of the larger community: ‘‘Sur-
prisingly, the two lovers in Donne’s private room
enact one of the central rituals of carnival. They
assume the personae of the dominant authority
figures of their diurnal society and mockingly
invert the social order’’ (54). The reference to
carnival catches the tone of ‘‘The Sunne Rising’’
very well, and it distinguishes Donne’s more
equivocal notion of the private world of love
from the exacting idealism and solemnity of Mil-
ton’s divorce tracts and his intense portrait of
marital love inParadise Lost. Donne’s pervasive
Song