Yet the inconsistencies in rhetoric that the poem manifests, what one scholar has deemed "a tangle of contradictions and reversals," make this commonly accepted interpretation unstable Brown While Donne's speaker may dislocate the outside world only for the extent of "The Sun Rising," he is still unsuccessful at convincing critical readers that internal love can symbolically replace the physical world if logic is subordinated to language.
The persona establishes several binary oppositions and seems to favor a certain hierarchy within the rhetorical structures he creates. As the poem progresses, however, he begins to misspeak, seemingly forgetting the earlier language of his discourse.
John Donne - Renaissance and Reformation - Oxford Bibliographies
Ultimately, the persona's reorganization of language, his attempt to push rhetoric beyond the limits of logic, fails; for, upon condensing the world around his lover and himself, he calls back those objects that he initially excluded. The poem dismantles itself through the inherent contradictions of the persona's rhetoric, leaving the reader unconvinced that language permits love to transcend the outside world.
In the first stanza of "The Sun Rising," Donne's persona creates several binary oppositions that indicate the poem's ultimate but unsuccessful argument: Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? As for the former, the persona objects to the sun's intrusion "Through windows" and "through curtains. And if the "Busy [and] unruly" sun permeates these modes of exclusion it will undermine his desired confinement, devitalizing his love as it intrudes upon his room.
Life and career
His reasoning leads into the other significant opposition of the poem's introduction: The "lovers' seasons" are placed against the sun's seasons, and the persona's disputatious tone suggests his efforts to subordinate everyday, natural motions to ceaseless love. All in all, the introductory stanza of "The Sun Rising" reveals the persona's motive to engage in mutual love within a confined realm that is free from the time constraints of the physical universe.
While in the first stanza the persona declares the physical world's inferiority to love, he also suggests the social sphere's necessary absence from his microcosm. Indeed, the sun is commanded to seek these individuals because its search will render the persona free from its "motions.
Renaissance Quarterly
However, the persuasive language of the first stanza begins to break down early in the second stanza, as the persona seems to forget the love ideals that he is seeking. By closing his eyes, he excludes the external world from his internal world of love. However, readers cannot be convinced that the persona continues to favor or, can continue to favor the ideal of love's eternity. The assertion "so long" at the end of line fourteen demonstrates that he is unable to create a language that is independent from the physical world.
His inside sphere and the outside world have a "tomorrow late" and a "yesterday," and through admitting this the persona evinces the inability of rhetoric to transcend the physical, momentary world and to exist apart from external influence The last two lines of the second stanza and the first two lines of the third stanza continue to manifest the persona's language dismantling itself.
Whereas earlier the persona commands the sun to leave because he wishes to live with his lover uninfluenced by time which, as discussed, is an unsuccessful endeavor and to remain uninterrupted by the outside, social world, here the poet claims that the social sphere is in his bed.
Donne: § 12. Paradoxes, Problems and other Prose Writings.
Indeed, the persona follows the putative seventeenth-century social paradigm of female inferiority when he claims that his lover is territory while he is the prince of that territory. Again, he is unable to utilize a language that can transcend the external world; in this instance, a dominant social ideology pervades his rhetoric, and his world of love cannot escape the outside structure once again. Before the third stanza begins, two of the binary oppositions that the persona establishes in the first stanza have broken down.
While he attempts to engage in a convincing discourse on the potency of love, the persona's rhetorical attachments to eternity and to social exclusion work within governing structures that he is unable to avoid; therefore, his argument for these ideals is not firmly grounded. He endeavors to use language in order to assert love's superiority to the external world, but by acknowledging time limitations and the social sphere he ultimately supports the structures that he hopes to undermine.
The last stanza of "The Sun Rising" consummates the destruction of his attempt. However, this idea is dismantled when the persona summons everything in the external world to his room: Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. Matthew and Brian Harrison, — Oxford University Press, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility.
Indiana University Press, The Life and Letters of John Donne: A seminal but outdated study first published in that focuses on Donne as a dedicated and successful poet. Walton, who knew Donne and wanted to celebrate him as a preacher, wrote this influential biography of Donne and his contemporaries, first published in Sometimes labeled hagiographic, this study generally portrays Donne as a sort of neo-Augustine who developed from an immature poet into a mature orthodox English Protestant minister. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
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