Many of the poems in John Donne’s Songs and
Sonets [sic] collection deal with varying attitudes toward love. Certainly
this is true of both “The Sun Rising” and “Love’s Alchemy.” The attitude toward love
expressed in “The Sun Rising” seems idealistic and celebratory, whereas the attitude
toward love expressed in “Love’s Alchemy” seems harshly cynical and
sarcastic.
In “The Sun Rising,” the male speaker begins by
criticizing the sun for interfering with his time in bed with his female
beloved:
Busy
old fool, unruly sun,Why dost thou
thusThrough windows and through curtains call on us?
(1-3)
The speaker tells the
sun to go bother others, since
Love, all alike, no season knows nor
clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
(9-10)
Throughout the rest of
the work, the speaker extols the mutual affection he shares with his beloved, including
their satisfying sexual relationship.
In “Love’s Alchemy,”
by contrast, the speaker is deeply skeptical about the advantages and happiness love can
allegedly produce. He seems to emphasize disproportionately the sexual aspects of love
and seems disappointed in the results – an emphasis that leads one to wonder whether he
has truly loved, in the deepest senses of the word, at all. In any case, he asserts
that anyone who has claimed to have had a sublime experience of love is a liar, and he
ends the poem by cynically warning,
Hope not for mind [that is, intelligence] in
women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they are but mummy,
possessed. (23-24)
In other
words, he claims that women are not particularly bright and that they are not especially
satisfying in bed, either. It is possible to argue, however, that the male speaker of
the poem is being mocked by Donne – that his sarcasm and cynicism boomerang, and that
the poem paints a far less attractive picture of the speaker himself than of the women
the speaker indicts.
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