'Call country ants to harvest offices ... ' Photograph: AP
I'm in the mood for old favourites this week, so here's another: John Donne's The Sun Rising. I posted my favourite Donne poem (A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning) back on the Cummings blog, but this one comes a close second, and has, I think, a stronger arc than the other. I love the thesis/antithesis/synthesis structure of the poem, via which Donne amplifies the expansive splendour of the final verse. In the first stanza, the power is with the sun, whom the poet casts as a troublesome nuisance, intent on ruining his love-making; in the second, Donne attempts instead to trivialise that power, claiming that his lover outshines the sun. This to and fro perfectly sets up the sublime third stanza, when the poet embraces both sun and lover, leading to the final couplet, in which the solipsism of love is ennobled and made glorious.
The Sun Rising by by John Donne
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.
