e-book John Donne (Critical Issues)

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"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

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.

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Donne: § 12. Paradoxes, Problems and other Prose Writings..
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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. 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.

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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. As noted earlier, he claims that love knows no time and exists independent from external influence.

Through this assertion, the persona confines himself and his lover willingly, expelling the sun and rejecting the cultural sphere with the notion that his love surpasses these aspects of the physical world. Yet the buttress of his final argument, which he presents syllogistically, is the assumption that his microcosmic world of love is the whole world. In lines twenty-seven and twenty-eight the persona reasons that since the sun is obligated to illuminate the world, it must shine on him and his lover; thus, he thinks that his microcosm is everything.

His bed, he asserts in the final line, is the center of the universe; his walls are its borders.

The persona's argument ends with the assumption that the entire physical world occupies his microcosm. He and his lover are the center of this new sphere, and their love transcends the physical limitations of the outside world.

Explanation of John Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" (Part 1/3)

But upon critical analysis, this rhetoric is unconvincing. He brings openness into his closed world, implicitly subverting his ideal to remain isolated from outside influence. Throughout the progression of "The Sun Rising," Donne's persona has made claims that undoubtedly break down as he continues to speak.

In the final instance, the confinement that he favors in his internal world of love, as opposed to the openness of the macrocosm, is undermined because he insists that the external world exists within his microcosm. He tries to embrace the ideals of eternity, social solitariness, and confinement; however, in this verbal enterprise, he incorporates the ideas that he is reacting against into his rhetoric. Works Cited Baumlin, James S. John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse. U of Missouri P, David Damrosch, et al. U of California P, Return to Index Page.

None of them shows him spiritually at peace.

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

These poems subsume their ostensible subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world. Through this idealized feminine figure, Donne in The First Anniversarie: In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule , Donne, partly through a eulogy on Elizabeth Drury, ultimately regains the wisdom that directs him toward eternal life.

The treatise so pleased James I that he had Oxford confer an honorary master of arts degree on Donne. In Donne completed his Essays in Divinity , the first of his theological works. Upon recovering from a life-threatening illness, Donne in wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the most enduring of his prose works.

One-hundred and fifty-six of them were published by his son in three great folio editions , , and Donne brilliantly analyzed Biblical texts and applied them to contemporary events, such as the outbreak of plague that devastated London in The power of his sermons derives from their dramatic intensity, candid personal revelations, poetic rhythms, and striking conceits.

Robert Browning credited Donne with providing the germ for his own dramatic monologues. By the 20th century, mainly because of the pioneering work of the literary scholar H. Grierson and the interest of T. The impression in his poetry that thought and argument are arising immediately out of passionate feeling made Donne the master of both the mature Yeats and Eliot, who were reacting against the meditative lyricism of a Romantic tradition in decline.

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