1 THE SUN RISING

                           THE SUN RISING

  The Sun Rising

     BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, 
     Why dost thou thus,
     Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? 
      Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? 
      Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide 
      Late school-boys and sour prentices, 
      Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, 
      Call country ants to harvest offices;
      Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, 
      Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

      Thy beams so reverend, and strong 
      Why shouldst thou think? 
      I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, 
      But that I would not lose her sight so long. 
      If her eyes have not blinded thine, 
      Look, and to-morrow late tell me, 
      Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine 
      Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me. 
      Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, 
      And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

      She's all states, and all princes I;
      Nothing else is; 
      Princes do but play us; compared to this, 
      All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy. 
      Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we, 
      In that the world's contracted thus; 
      Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be 
      To warm the world, that's done in warming us. 
      Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; 
      This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

                                                                       John Donne: “The Sun Rising”

The poet tries to start a revolution from his bed.

BY STEPHEN BURT

John Donne (1572-1631) wrote a prose work called Paradoxes and Problems, and         his life presents plenty of both: he was born a Catholic, gained notoriety for                   sacrilegious verse, and later in life became an Anglican priest. Though some of his       poems defended libertinism and casual sex, he destroyed his first career by falling         in love, and stayed with the woman he married until her death. His poems picked           up a reputation for head-scratchingly bizarre intellectualism—one reason they're           now called metaphysical—but some of them are the most deeply felt poems of               romantic love in the language. One such poem is "The Sun Rising."

A former law student whose London relatives were persecuted for remaining Catholic after England had turned Protestant, Donne ruined what could have been a fine career at court when in 1601 he secretly married his employer's niece, Anne More. The next year, Donne's employer found out and fired him. Donne later found his calling as an Anglican cleric, giving dramatic sermons at London's most famous church. Until after his death, most of Donne's poems circulated only in manuscript: his friends copied them by hand, then showed them to their friends, who copied them into their commonplace books. (If you think of a book of poems as like a compact disc, then a commonplace book is like a mix tape, or an iPod; Donne's poems were like popular, unreleased MP3s.)

Donne liked to make long, odd comparisons, called conceits: he compared two lovers to the parts of a compass, for example, and likened a teardrop to a navigator's globe. Later poets such as Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) built whole careers by imitating those conceits. By the time Cowley died, though, conceits had gone out of fashion. When the influential critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) coined the term metaphysical poets, he meant it as an insult: "Metaphysical poets" such as Cowley and Donne, he wrote, used their conceits to present "heterogenous ideas ... yoked by violence together"; "they were not successful in representing or moving the affections." (In other words, they had too much head, not enough heart.) The term metaphysicalstuck, though the judgment did not: when modernist critics and poets such as T.S. Eliot wanted to rehabilitate Donne, they defended something called metaphysical poetry, and praised the metaphysical conceit.

Readers like to believe that Donne's libertine poems—which insult women in general, or recommend sex with many partners—date from his law-student days, while the passionate, sincere-sounding love poems reflect his romance and marriage with Anne. As with Shakespeare's sonnets, nobody really knows. It's no wonder, though, that so many readers (myself included) imagine "The Sun Rising" as written to Anne. In it, Donne and his beloved wake up together, and Donne fears that someone will walk in on them: the unwelcome intruder is (not her father, nor his boss, nor a London stranger, but) the sun, which (here's the conceit) Donne treats as a person: 

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. 

Meanings

Unruly-disorderly and disruptive and not amenable to discipline or control.

 Ex-" a group of unruly children".

 dost- archaic second person singular present of do¹

 thou-  archaic or dialect form of you, as the singular subject of a verb.  Ex-"thou art fair, O my beloved"

 thy-    archaic or dialect form of your.   Ex- "honour thy father and thy mother"

 saucy-  sexually suggestive in a light-hearted and humorous way. "saucy postcards"

synonyms:	suggestive, titillating, risqué, rude, bawdy, racy, ribald, spicy

pedantic- excessively concerned with minor details or rules; overscrupulous. "his analyses are careful and even painstaking, but never pedantic".

wretch-   an unfortunate or unhappy person. "can the poor wretch's corpse tell us anything?"

chide-  scold or rebuke. "she chided him for not replying to her letters"

sour-  feeling or expressing resentment, disappointment, or anger. "he gave her a sour look"

prentices- noun & verb plural noun: prentices; 3rd person present: prentice archaic term  for apprentice.

rags-   give a decorative effect to (a painted surface) by applying paint, typically of a different colour, with a rag.

"the background walls have been stippled above the dado rail and ragged below".

"Prentices" are apprentices, who (like today's sullen teens) oversleep; "motions" are regular changes, such as sunset or sunrise, spring or fall. Donne and Anne (we might as well call her Anne) believe it's more important to be in love than to be on time: they won't let the hour, or the month , or even their relative ages, tell them what to do.

Nor do they want to get up out of their shared bed. From medieval French to modern English, there's a tradition of poems called aubades, about lovers who awaken at dawn: often they are adulterous or illicit lovers, who don't want to separate but don't want to get caught. Donne wrote such a poem himself, called "Break of Day." In "The Sun Rising," though, Donne and Anne feel right at home: there's no chance either of them will go anywhere, because their love has placed them where they belong, and everything else must reorient itself around them.

It follows that Donne is the master of the house; the sun, as a guest, should respect and obey him. Donne therefore reverses the conceit: having likened the sun to a person, he now gives a person—himself—the powers of the sun: 

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

Thy-  archaic or dialect form of your. "honour thy father and thy mother"

 Beams-     a long, sturdy piece of squared timber or metal used to support the roof or floor of a building. "there are very fine oak beams in the oldest part of the house"

Reverend-  used as a title or form of address to members of the clergy. "the Reverend Pat Tilly"

Thou-  archaic or dialect form of you, as the singular subject of a verb.  Ex-"thou art fair, O my beloved"                                                                                              Eclipse-   an obscuring of the light from one celestial body by the passage of another between it and the observer or between it and its source of illumination. "an eclipse of the sun"                                                                                                                     Wink-  close and open one eye quickly, typically to indicate that something is a joke or a secret or as a signal of affection or greeting."he winked at Nicole as he passed"

Thine-   archaic form of yours; the thing or things belonging to or associated with thee.

"his spirit will take courage from thine".

 Lefst-  One who holds a left-wing viewpoint; someone who seeks radical social and economic change in the direction of greater equality.                                                                     Saw’st- Obsolete form of sawest.                                                                            Shalt-  archaic second person singular of shall.                                                          Lay- put (something) down gently or carefully.

"she laid the baby in his cot"

Donne could occlude or outshine the sun (because he, too, is a celestial body), but he won't (because then his beloved would not see him, and he would not see her). Since everything important to Donne (i.e., Anne) stays indoors, not outside, Donne feels as if everything commonly believed important—spices from the Indian Ocean, precious metals from West Indies mines—remains securely indoors too.

In fact (here we see the extravagance of the conceit), everything and everyone of any importance is already in Donne's bed: 

She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Mimic-  imitate (someone or their actions or words), especially in order to entertain or ridicule."she mimicked Eileen's pedantic voice"

Honor-  - a source of credit or distinction: to be an honor to one's country. 3. high respect, as for worth, merit, or rank: to be held in great honor. 4. such respect manifested: a memorial in honor of the dead; the place of honor at the table.

 Alchemy-   the medieval forerunner of chemistry, concerned with the transmutation of matter, in particular with attempts to convert base metals into gold or find a universal elixir. "occult sciences, such as alchemy and astrology".

Thine-  archaic form of yours; the thing or things belonging to or associated with thee.

"his spirit will take courage from thine"

 Ease-  absence of difficulty or effort. "she gave up smoking with ease"

Shine-  (of the sun or another source of light) give out a bright light.

"the sun shone through the window".

 Thou-  archaic or dialect form of you, as the singular subject of a verb.  Ex-"thou art fair, O my beloved".

 Thy-  archaic or dialect form of your. "honour thy father and thy mother".

 Sphere-   a round solid figure, or its surface, with every point on its surface equidistant from its centre.

The sun, having been shown the door, now gets asked to remain. The pronouns "I" and "she" disappear, leaving only "us" and "we"; thus combined, the lovers become the whole Earth, and since the sun's job is to warm the Earth, it ought to stay where the lovers are, and orbit them. Not only will Donne and Anne escape detection and censure, since the sun will never shine anywhere else, but the lovers won't even have to get out of bed.

Fancy metaphysical conceits differ from plain-Jane metaphors not just because conceits run all the way through a poem, but also because they often bring in the latest in Renaissance science and technology. Remember that the sun is like a person, but Donne is like a celestial body: he and Anne, together, replace the Earth. "Sphere" comes from the old, Ptolemaic cosmology (the one Galileo and Copernicus disproved), in which the sun supposedly went round the Earth (as did all other planets, each in its own "sphere"). In Donne's time, astronomers (and astrologers) still argued about what went around what. His interest in scientific controversy, in ongoing disputes about natural and supernatural truths, gave him metaphors for his poems. The same interest helps give this poem its emotional force: nobody knows if the sun goes around the Earth, or vice versa, that last line implies, but I'm quite certain that my life revolves around yours.

Donne's conceit describes the sun as a human being who walks in on the lovers, and then—with help from what was, to Donne, modern science—makes himself and his beloved into their own cosmic entity, their own world. You might see how readers who (like Johnson) thought poets should stay away from complex images found such flights of figuration distasteful. In "The Sun Rising," though—and in other Donne poems akin to it ("The Canonization," for example, and "The Relic")—the figure of speech is extreme for a very good reason: Donne's devotion is extreme, too, and only "heterogenous ideas yoked by violence together," only the language of the metaphysical conceit, can express the depths of his love.

John Donne: Poems Summary and Analysis of "The Sunne Rising"

The poet asks the sun why it is shining in and disturbing him and his lover in bed. The sun should go away and do other things rather than disturb them, like wake up ants or rush late schoolboys to start their day. Lovers should be permitted to make their own time as they see fit. After all, sunbeams are nothing compared to the power of love, and everything the sun might see around the world pales in comparison to the beloved’s beauty, which encompasses it all. The bedroom is the whole world.

Analysis

“The Sunne Rising” is a 30-line poem in three stanzas, written with the poet/lover as the speaker. The meter is irregular, ranging from two to six stresses per line in no fixed pattern. The longest lines are generally at the end of the three stanzas, but Donne’s focus here is not on perfect regularity. The rhyme, however, never varies, each stanza running abbacdcdee. The poet’s tone is mocking and railing as it addresses the sun, covering an undercurrent of desperate, perhaps even obsessive love and grandiose ideas of what his lover is.

The poet personifies the sun as a “busy old fool” (line 1). He asks why it is shining in and disturbing “us” (4), who appear to be two lovers in bed. The sun is peeking through the curtains of the window of their bedroom, signaling the morning and the end of their time together. The speaker is annoyed, wishing that the day has not yet come (compare Juliet’s assurances that it is certainly not the morning, inRomeo and Juliet III.v). The poet then suggests that the sun go off and do other things rather than disturb them, such as going to tell the court huntsman that it is a day for the king to hunt, or to wake up ants, or to rush late schoolboys and apprentices to their duties. The poet wants to know why it is that “to thy motions lovers’ seasons run” (4). He imagines a world, or desires one, where the embraces of lovers are not relegated only to the night, but that lovers can make their own time as they see fit.

In the second stanza the poet continues to mock the sun, saying that its “beams so reverend and strong” are nothing compared to the power and glory of their love. He boasts that he “could eclipse and cloud them [the sunbeams] with a wink.” In a way this is true; he can cut out the sun from his view by closing his eyes. Yet, the lover doesn’t want to “lose her sight so long” as a wink would take. The poet is emphasizing that the sun has no real power over what he and his lover do, while he is the one who chooses to allow the sun in because by it he can see his lover’s beauty.

The lover then moves on to loftier claims. “If her eyes have not blinded thine” (13) implies that his beloved’s eyes are more brilliant than sunlight. This was a standard Renaissance love-poem convention (compare Shakespeare “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” in Sonnet 130) to proclaim his beloved’s loveliness. Indeed, the sun should “tell me/Whether both th’Indias of spice and mine/Be where thou lef’st them, or lie here with me.” Here, Donne lists wondrous and exotic places (the Indias are the West and East Indies, well known in Donne’s time for their spices and precious metals) and says that his mistress is all of those things: “All here in one bed lay” (20). “She’s all states, and all princes I”(21). That is, all the beautiful and sovereign things in the world, which the sun meets as it travels the world each day, are combined in his mistress.

This is a monstrous, bold comparison, a hyperbole of the highest order. As usual, such an extreme comparison leads us to see a spiritual metaphor in the poem. As strong as the sun’s light is, it pales in comparison to the spiritual light that shines from the divine and which brings man to love the divine.

The strange process of reducing the entire world to the bed of the lovers reaches its zenith in the last stanza: “In that the world’s contracted thus” (26). Indeed, the sun need not leave the room; by shining on them “thou art everywhere” (29). The final line contains a play on the Ptolemaic astronomical idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun rotating around the Earth: “This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.” Here Donne again gives ultimate universal importance to the lovers, making all the physical world around them subject to them.

This poem gives voice to the feeling of lovers that they are outside of time and that their emotions are the most important things in the world. There is something of the adolescent melodrama of first love here, which again suggests that Donne is exercising his intelligence and subtlety to make a different kind of point. While the love between himself and his lover may seem divine, metaphorically it can be true that divine love is more important than the things of this world.

The conflation of the earth into the body of his beloved is a little more difficult to understand. Donne would not be the first man who likened his female lover to a field to be sown by him, or a country to be ruled by him. Yet, if she represents the world because God loves the world, is Donne really putting himself, as the one who loves, in the position of God?

What we can say with some firmness is that the sun, which marks the passage of earthly time, is rejected as an authority. The “seasons” of lovers (with the pun on the seasons of the earth, also ruled by the sun) should not be ruled by the movements of the sun. There should be nothing above the whims and desires of lovers, as they feel, and on the spiritual level the sun is just one more creation of God; all time and physical laws are subject to God.

That the sun, of course, will not heed a man’s insults and orders is tacitly acknowledged. It will continue on its way each day, and one cannot wink it out of existence. There is nothing that the poet can do to change the movements of the sun or the coming of the day, no matter how clever his comparisons. From his perspective, the whole world is right there with him, yet he knows that his perspective is limited. This conceit of railing against the sun and denying the reality of the world outside the bedroom closes the poem with a more heartfelt (and more believable) assertion that the “bed thy center is.” It can be imagined that here he is speaking more to himself, realizing that the time he has with his lover is more important to him than anything else in his life in this moment, even while the spiritual meaning of the poem extends to the sun’s relatively weak power compared with the cosmic forces of the divine.

DONNE’S POETRY

John Donne

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“The Sun Rising”

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Summary

Lying in bed with his lover, the speaker chides the rising sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and asking why it must bother them through windows and curtains. Love is not subject to season or to time, he says, and he admonishes the sun—the “Saucy pedantic wretch”—to go and bother late schoolboys and sour apprentices, to tell the court-huntsmen that the King will ride, and to call the country ants to their harvesting.

Why should the sun think that his beams are strong? The speaker says that he could eclipse them simply by closing his eyes, except that he does not want to lose sight of his beloved for even an instant. He asks the sun—if the sun’s eyes have not been blinded by his lover’s eyes—to tell him by late tomorrow whether the treasures of India are in the same place they occupied yesterday or if they are now in bed with the speaker. He says that if the sun asks about the kings he shined on yesterday, he will learn that they all lie in bed with the speaker.

The speaker explains this claim by saying that his beloved is like every country in the world, and he is like every king; nothing else is real. Princes simply play at having countries; compared to what he has, all honor is mimicry and all wealth is alchemy. The sun, the speaker says, is half as happy as he and his lover are, for the fact that the world is contracted into their bed makes the sun’s job much easier—in its old age, it desires ease, and now all it has to do is shine on their bed and it shines on the whole world. “This bed thy centre is,” the speaker tells the sun, “these walls, thy sphere.”

Form

The three regular stanzas of “The Sun Rising” are each ten lines long and follow a line-stress pattern of 4255445555—lines one, five, and six are metered in iambic tetrameter, line two is in dimeter, and lines three, four, and seven through ten are in pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACDCDEE.

Commentary

One of Donne’s most charming and successful metaphysical love poems, “The Sun Rising” is built around a few hyperbolic assertions—first, that the sun is conscious and has the watchful personality of an old busybody; second, that love, as the speaker puts it, “no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time”; third, that the speaker’s love affair is so important to the universe that kings and princes simply copy it, that the world is literally contained within their bedroom. Of course, each of these assertions simply describes figuratively a state of feeling—to the wakeful lover, the rising sun does seem like an intruder, irrelevant to the operations of love; to the man in love, the bedroom can seem to enclose all the matters in the world. The inspiration of this poem is to pretend that each of these subjective states of feeling is an objective truth.

Accordingly, Donne endows his speaker with language implying that what goes on in his head is primary over the world outside it; for instance, in the second stanza, the speaker tells the sun that it is not so powerful, since the speaker can cause an eclipse simply by closing his eyes. This kind of heedless, joyful arrogance is perfectly tuned to the consciousness of a new lover, and the speaker appropriately claims to have all the world’s riches in his bed (India, he says, is not where the sun left it; it is in bed with him). The speaker captures the essence of his feeling in the final stanza, when, after taking pity on the sun and deciding to ease the burdens of his old age, he declares “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.”

Context

John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, lawyer and cleric (church man). He is now included in a group called the ‘metaphysical’ poets, who wrote about love and religion and used elaborate metaphors in doing so. These poets were not a group who knew each other: the name was created by literary critics years later. Donne is often considered to be the greatest of these ‘metaphysical’ poets.

Donne was born into a Catholic family (an illegal religion at that time). He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, but because he was a Catholic he was not allowed to gain a degree. When his brother died, Donne began to question his religion. Some years later, at the insistence of King James I, Donne was ordained a priest in the Church of England. He was also elected to be a Member of Parliament.

He was married to Anne Egerton, the daughter of an important member of the government. They married without permission and, as a result, Donne spent a short time in prison. The couple had 12 children, of whom only seven survived past the age of 10. Anne died fourteen years before her husband.

Donne led a very eventful life, and was a celebrated poet during his own lifetime. His poems fall into different categories. There are the religious poems, most of which date from after the death of his wife. The majority of his most famous poems, though, are addressed to women: whether angry, erotic, or romantic!

Subject matter

The sun Rising is a romantic poem, in which the narrator addresses the sun, which is interrupting his lie-in with his lover. He tells the sun to go off and call on all sorts of other people, from "late school-boys" and "sour prentices" to the"court-huntsmen".

The narrator then tells the sun to go and look around the world for all its treasures. But he says that they will not still be in place, because they are all here in bed with him. His lover is "all states", and as a result he is the ruler of the whole world. He goes on to say that they are doing the sun a favour in his old age, because he only has to shine on them to shine on the whole world.

It is a poem about love, which celebrates the woman with whom Donne is in bed.

Form and structure

The form of The Sun Rising is an interesting one. It follows a complicated metrical pattern of stressed beats per line, but each of the three verses follows it strictly. The easiest way to see it is to count the number of syllables per line: 8, 4, 10, 10, 8, 8, 10, 10, 10, 10. There are half the number of stresses per line than there are syllables. This is a unique pattern that Donne has invented for his poem.

The poem also follows a regular rhyme scheme in each verse, but again it is an unusual structure: ABBACDCDEE. Each of the three stanzas follows the same pattern of beats and rhymes.

Language and Imagery

The poem is sometimes published with its original 17th century spelling (eg ‘sunne’), or with standardised modern spelling instead. The spelling used here is the modernised version.

Imagery

The main conceit ( excessive pride in oneself) or metaphor(a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else.) of the poem is the personification of the sun into an old man – a "busy old fool" – whose business it is to get everyone out of bed and on the way to work. The persona adopted by the poet sees fit to argue with the sun, and this creates a comic opening to the poem. This is extended when, in the second stanza, he claims that he is stronger than the sun, because he can"eclipse and cloud" his beams just by blinking. This is of course true, but it does not really mean that the sun is not "so reverend, and strong". At the end of the poem he treats the Sun more gently: his "age asks ease" so they are in the position to help him, since he only has to warm the two of them, and he warms the whole world.

The secondary conceit is the metaphor that the speaker’s lover is "all states" – she is all the treasures of the world. As a result, therefore, he is "all princes". Donne elevates the importance of the relationship using this hyperbole.( exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally."he vowed revenge with oaths and hyperboles")

He combines this hyperbole (the speaker has all the power in the world) with litotes (ironical understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary (e.g. I shan't be sorry for I shall be glad ), in his deliberate reduction of the importance of everything else. Measurements of time, ie "hours, days, months", are likened to "rags", all honour is "mimic" (ie fake), and wealth is "alchemy" (ie it isn’t real). He sums it up with the statement "nothing else is". This combination of the two techniques demonstrates how great their love is. Metaphorically, it is the only thing in the world – and so their room becomes the whole "sphere" for the sun.

Sound

Alliteration is used to complement the mood of the poem as it changes in the stanzas. In the first stanza there are a lot of strong consonantal sounds, like the ‘t’ and ‘c’ combinations in "pedantic wretch, go chide", which emphasises the tone of the telling off. In the last stanza, the alliteration falls on softer sounds, like ‘w’, as is appropriate for the soppy ending of the poem.

Attitudes, themes and ideas

The poem begins with a comic, argumentative tone, but quickly switches into pride in his lover, and finally into a very romantic tone. Love is elevated and celebrated in this poem. It is shown as conquering all and as being the most important thing in the world, or even the only thing in the world. It empowers the speaker to fight with the sun.

The tone of the poem shows how much the speaker cherishes his lover: she is worth all the treasure in the world. He also refuses to close his eyes, because he doesn’t want to lose the sight of her for as long as a blink.

Everything in the poem suggests that what is taking place inside the speaker’s head is more important (and more real) than what is going on outside it. The poem takes feelings (such as the idea that the sun is disturbing you in the morning) and makes them into concrete realities. The poem is highlighting a universal truth – that everyone feels that the world revolves around them when they fall in love!

Sample task:

Examine how Shakespeare presents men’s treatment of women in Twelfth Night

Examine how this theme is revealed in poetry, for example in Donne’s The Sun Rising and/or Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover. Refer to other poems from the poetry selection in your response.

What is your response to the pieces of literature you have read? Make links between the ways the writers have considered and presented the theme.

     Both Orsino in Twelfth Night and the character in Donne’s The Sun Rising demonstrate a tendency in men to idealise women, to put them on a pedestal and elevate them. Orsino interprets every action of Olivia’s to show why she would be the perfect woman, so that the fact that she is mourning her brother so deeply becomes to him an indication of how deeply she will love him, if she shows this affection "but to a brother". Donne’s narrator, meanwhile, elevates his love by using the metaphor that she is "all states" – the whole world – so that the sun only has to shine in one place, their bed, which becomes the centre of the world.

      This elevation increases the sense, particularly in Twelfth Night, that the man does not actually know the woman he is idolising at all. He only manages to get to know a woman as a person as opposed to as an idealised beauty when Viola is disguised as Cesario, so that the pair of them can talk on an equal level. Even a poem such as Sonnet 18 which warns against trying to elevate women by means of poetry ("Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely") actually ends by being about the talents of the man, who can make her"eternal" through his poem.                                         The Sun Rising equally demonstrates that idolising the woman does not mean that she is on an equal level with her lover: she may be the whole world, but he claims "all Princes I" – that is, he rules the whole world if she is "all states". She makes him so powerful, in fact, that he can"eclipse" the Sun, just by closing his eyes. This metaphorical power reflects the actual physical dominance of a man over a woman – such as the ease with which the narrator in Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover kills Porphyria.

      The idea of dominance does not, however, have to be so elevated as in The Sun Rising. In Twelfth Night one of the few couples who seem well-matched, in personality if not in social class, are Sir Toby Belch and Maria. Despite this he describes her as "a beagle, true-bred, and one that adores me". Although she is rather more functional than he is, and the source of the ingenious plot to destroy Malvolio, Maria is diminished by her lover by the metaphor of her as a lap-dog.

        However, in The Sun Rising, there is also a strong sense that the narrator cherishes his lover; he cannot bear to close his eyes because he would lose the sight of her, and she is a treasure "of spice and mine". This is also evident at the end of Twelfth Night when Orsino, no longer worshipping a woman he doesn’t know, treats Viola with evident love and care. He also relinquishes his role as her "master" as he was when she was Cesario, and instead offers her his hand in marriage so that "You shall from this time be/ Your master’s mistress". The equality of their friendship when they were both "men" seems set to carry through into their romantic relationship now that Viola is revealed as a woman.