Point of View

The poem is written from the first-person perspective of a speaker who addresses the sun. This perspective is a common one for both Donne's erotic and spiritual poems, as it allows him to represent the experiences of love and spirituality in an intimate way. Critics have noted that Donne's poetry can be divided, generally, into two camps: poetry about sex and poetry about God. However, more often than not, these two genres are often conflated into single poems. The first-person point of view serves both of these genres, as Donne was profoundly interested in man's personal relationship with God as well as the experience of earthly love as a microcosm of divine love. In "The Sun Rising," the first-person perspective helps dramatize the experience of being in love as the speaker, in a self-aware manner, confronts the order of the universe with the confidence of...