"Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?"
About this Quote
“Busy old fool, unruly Sun” opens with an insult that’s funny because it’s brazenly impossible. Donne starts by picking a fight with the one thing no one can negotiate with: time, embodied as the Sun’s daily harassment. The mock-scolding is the point. By treating the cosmos like a nosy servant barging through curtains, he shrinks a vast, indifferent force down to the size of an inconvenience. It’s swagger as intimacy: lovers in bed turning the universe into background noise.
The subtext is less “love is timeless” than “love demands sovereignty.” “Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?” flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of humans obeying the calendar, the speaker proposes an alternate order where private desire outranks public schedules, work, and nature’s clock. It’s the same argumentative energy Donne uses across the metaphysical tradition: take an abstract claim and make it feel physical, even domestic. The Sun “calls on us” like an unwanted visitor; time is social pressure.
Context sharpens the bite. Early 17th-century London is an increasingly regulated world: commerce, court life, religious discipline, and the literal tolling of bells organizing days. Donne, writing in a culture newly obsessed with measurement and duty, stages the bedroom as a small insurgent state. The rhetorical trick is that the complaint is also a flex. If you can talk down to the Sun, you’re claiming not just passion, but power: the lovers’ room becomes a center of gravity strong enough to rewrite what matters.
The subtext is less “love is timeless” than “love demands sovereignty.” “Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?” flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of humans obeying the calendar, the speaker proposes an alternate order where private desire outranks public schedules, work, and nature’s clock. It’s the same argumentative energy Donne uses across the metaphysical tradition: take an abstract claim and make it feel physical, even domestic. The Sun “calls on us” like an unwanted visitor; time is social pressure.
Context sharpens the bite. Early 17th-century London is an increasingly regulated world: commerce, court life, religious discipline, and the literal tolling of bells organizing days. Donne, writing in a culture newly obsessed with measurement and duty, stages the bedroom as a small insurgent state. The rhetorical trick is that the complaint is also a flex. If you can talk down to the Sun, you’re claiming not just passion, but power: the lovers’ room becomes a center of gravity strong enough to rewrite what matters.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
|---|---|
| Source | John Donne, "The Sunne Rising" (The Sun Rising), 17th century — opening lines of the poem. Source edition: Poetry Foundation poem page. |
More Quotes by John
Add to List
