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Vagif Mammadov

Varistha Persad

ENG4U-04

14 December 2020

Explain why you chose the images included on your collage. What do they represent?

I have included several images in my poetry collage. The “old man”  which describes

personification in the poem as the speaker addressed to the sun like “Busy old fool, unruly

sun,” . “Globus” and “prince” show  that the speaker’s  lover is all countries and Princes

only pretend to be them  so I chose a globus and prince which would represent these lines

very well. I  attached  an image of the “sun”,  “bed”, and “rag” because the speaker wants to

bend the rules of the universe. Rather than allowing the sun's "motions" across the sky to

govern the way the speaker spends his time, the speaker challenges the sun's authority and

claims that love gives him (the speaker) the power to stay in bed all day with his lover. In this

way, the poem elevates the importance and power of love above work, duty, and even the

natural rhythms of the day itself.The speaker goes on to distinguish love as unfamiliar with

"the rags of time," suggesting that love is everlasting and therefore not subject to the starts

and stops of "hours, days, months," and other temporal units that govern the lives of "school

boys," "horsemen," and "country ants." Time, including the rising and setting sun, works

differently for lovers than for anyone else.

Explain why you chose the adjectives included on your collage. How does each one represent

the theme?

In this collage I have used the adjectives disruptive, inflexible, reverend, bright, and

cheap. The first three adjectives are used in order to describe the sun. The first three lines of
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"The Sun Rising" establish the relationship and tension among the three entities of the poem:

the speaker, his lover, and the sun. The speaker disparagingly personifies the sun as a "busy

old fool" who is "unruly" in the face of some authority. That authority is revealed at the end

of line three to be "us," the speaker and an unknown party (later revealed to be his lover),

who together relish the peaceful darkness of a curtained room. The sun is shown as

“inflexible” and “strong” in the poem because it rises and makes school boys be scolded.

Although the speaker concedes that the sun is free to rule over "late school boys" (as well as

several other parties for whom the speaker seems to have little respect), he claims that

all he would have to do to "eclipse and cloud" the sun would be to close his eyes. The ease of

this action demonstrates that the sun is indeed "foolish" to think that its beams are "reverend

and strong" in the face of a lover. The word “bright” shows the speaker’s biggest love to his

lover as it is used to describe the brightness of her eyes. The speaker used the word “cheap”

because he thinks princes only pretend to be them, compared to their love, all honor is a

cheap copy, and all wealth is a futile attempt to attain riches.

Explain why you chose the excerpts included on your collage. What underlying ideas to they

represent?

The first excerpt  that I chose is “Busy old fool, unruly sun” (line 1), in which the

speaker personifies the sun throughout nearly the entire poem a a self-important old man in

order to rob the sun of its authority. This personification begins in the very first line, when

the speaker addresses his words to a "Busy old fool, unruly sun." The poem thus opens with

the introduction of the sun as a character with human traits. These traits are not to be looked

upon favorably. In the speaker's ageist portrayal of the sun, it is getting "unruly," meaning

that it is getting worse as it ages at serving those it is supposed to serve, but it is too "foolish"

to realize its own decline. “Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime” (line 9) claims that  
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love, in all its forms, is above the influence of seasons and weather. “All honor's mimic, all

wealth alchemy” ( line 24) in which  the speaker undermines the power of political rulers

directly in comparison to himself. He insists that he is not mimicking a prince but rather that,

"Princes do but play us." “To warm the world, that's done in warming us” ( line 28) in here

the speaker is not only giving the sun orders to annoy others instead of him and his lover, but

he's also ordering the sun to actually serve the lovers by warming them in their bed. The

lovers thus become the greater authority that the sun itself ought to obey.By asserting himself

as the ruler of the sun, the speaker claims the authority to indefinitely extend the dawn so that

he can stay with his lover. “This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere” (line 30) in which

the speaker has "contracted" the entire world to the bed, so that the sun’s job is to "warm"

there. Whereas most people must leave their beds during the day in order to accomplish their

jobs, the speaker's insistence that love is the most important occupation anyone could have

makes the bed into a sort of daytime workplace. What's more, that workplace is so important

that the sun must drop what it is doing everywhere else in order to make the "work" of the

bedroom possible.
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The Sun Rising 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 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.

               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.
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Works cited

1. Florman, Ben. Kestler, Justin. “The Sun Rising Summary and Analysis”. litcharts.com
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