The Sun Rising

The poem is playful in tone, full of hyperbole (exaggeration) and wit, but with the serious purpose of extolling the vastness, timelessness, and beauty of love between of a couple. Stanza 1 contains a sharp contrast between the rhythms of time and the lovers’ sense of eternity. At the beginning, the speaker adopts a posture unlike what one might expect. Instead of worshipping or otherwise honoring and saluting the sun, he mocks and humbles it as an “old fool” (Line 1) insisting on going where it is not wanted. Far from being pleased with the coming of dawn and the new day, the speaker is irritated by it; he regards the sun as a nuisance. In Lines 2 and 3, he has the temerity to ask the sun why it is projecting its rays through the curtains of his bedroom where he sleeps with his lover.

Line 4, “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?” hints at one of the themes of the poem: Lovers exist in an eternal present and are not subject to the passage of time that is marked by the movement of the sun across the sky.