Donne's Songs and Sonnets do not describe a single unchanging view of love; they express a wide variety of emotions and attitudes, as if Donne himself were trying to express his experience of love through his poetry. Donne portrays the different ways in which love can be an experience of the body, the soul, or both; it can be a religious experience, or merely a sexual one, and it can make way to various emotions ranging from ecstasy to despair. Taking for instance one of Donne's poems "The Sunne Rising" by itself will give us an insight into Donne's attitude to these values, but treating the poem as if it were part of a life experience. .
The poem "The Sunne Rising", with it's boldness, its transvaluation of worldly values, and its patronising indication to the sun that his sphere is the lover's bedroom (Redpath 1983: 180), is Donne's own imagination at work. Take for example in stanza one: "Busie old foole, unruly Sunne" the sun is scornfully labelled as being an old busy body, and he rebukes it for circling around the lovers bed and moving in such a way that it disturbs their sex exhausted sleep (Carey 1980: 56), which can be gathered from the stanza: "Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?.
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?".
He is then told to chide the late schoolboys and "sour prentices". In stanza nine "Love, all alike" he goes on to talk about love which is unchanging. Stanza 10 "The rags of time" suggest the simple tattered clothing of time or alternatively, the shreds into which time is torn up and subdivided. However in stanzas 19-20, 21-2, 23-4: On analysing these stanzas Donne seems to involve some contradiction as we see in 19-20 the lovers are both kings. Whereas male dominance seems to place itself into the poem. Yet in 23, the beloved has become a ruler once more. Then in stanza 30 it goes on to saying how the bed is centre of the beloved's orbit.
And that the walls are the outer shell within which the beloved's orbit is described (Redpath 1983: 181).
