NON-AFRICAN POETRY Comment on the imagery in "The Sunne Rising

Answer Details

John Donne's "The Sunne Rising" is rich in vivid and often extravagant imagery through which the poet celebrates the supremacy of love. The lovers' bedroom becomes the whole world, and the sun is reduced to a mere servant, as Donne uses striking images to exalt his love above kings, seasons and the heavens.

Personification of the sun. The central image is the sun addressed as a living intruder, a "busy old fool" and "unruly" pedant who peeps through curtains and disturbs the lovers. By scolding the sun as a meddlesome old man, Donne belittles the greatest of natural bodies and asserts that love answers to no external timetable of "hours, days, months".

Imagery of kingship and empire. The lover claims that all the world's riches and rulers are contained in the bed. "She is all states, and all princes I"; the beloved is every kingdom and the poet every monarch. The spices and mines of the Indies, and the kings the sun shines on, are all present in the one room. This hyperbolic imagery makes the lovers a self-sufficient world that contains and outshines all real empires.

Cosmic and microcosmic imagery. The bedroom is transformed into a microcosm of the universe: "This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere". The room becomes the centre of creation around which the sun must revolve, reversing the ordinary relation between the vast heavens and the small chamber.

Imagery of light and blindness. Donne toys with the sun's beams, boasting he could eclipse them with a wink but will not, lest he lose sight of his beloved. Light imagery is used to argue that the beloved's eyes could blind the sun itself.

Through these bold, witty and exaggerated images, characteristic of metaphysical poetry, Donne compresses the entire world into the lovers' room and elevates private love above time, royalty and the cosmos.