Separation of Two Worlds Within John Donne's "The Sun Rising" Anonymous College

Separation of Two Worlds Within John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”

Published in 1633, John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” represents an era of metaphysical literary strategies. In order to capture the engrossing love of the poem’s two characters, Donne craftily uses personification, symbolism, hyperboles, and assorted metaphors to characterize the lovers. All in all, the poet strives to use language to suggest romantic love’s superiority to the physical world. While in most of Donne’s love poetry the speaker assumes a haughty and argumentative tone, “The Sun Rising” instead focuses on the power of mutual love and its accompanying emotions. Pretending each subjective state of feeling is transformed by the lovers into objective truth, the speaker suggests he and his lover are the center of the universe and they subsequently transcend the world around them. Throughout the poem, Donne uses specific rhetorical techniques to create an isolated world for his two lovers. Ultimately, the displacement of the external world in place of the inner, emotional sphere serves to highlight the importance of human love as it exists within a permanent physical universe.

In “The Sun Rising,” the most important conceit concerns the personification of...