Donne: The Sun Rising MCQs

Henry Donne died in prison in 1593 after being arrested for harbouring a Catholic priest; Donne himself sailed to Cadiz only in 1596. Donne's recusant Catholic upbringing shaped his early life, his education and his lifelong preoccupation with sin, death and salvation.

Roman Catholics in Elizabethan England could not take the Oath of Supremacy, which barred Donne from graduating. He possibly attended Cambridge too, with no degree recorded, and later studied law at Thavies Inn (1591) and Lincoln's Inn (1592).

Hart Hall (1584) → Lincoln's Inn (1592) → Cadiz expedition (1596) → secret marriage to Anne More (December 1601).

Egerton's secretaryship promised a successful public career, but it ended with Donne's secret marriage to Anne More, a member of Egerton's wider family circle. Essex led the expeditions Donne joined, and Drury was later a patron.

Donne's participation in the Cadiz expedition and the Azores voyage is well attested. His travels also fed the geographical imagery of his poetry ("both th' Indias", "maps", "new worlds").

Statements 1 and 3 are correct. The marriage was performed without Sir George More's consent, so statement 2 is false. Donne was briefly imprisoned in the Fleet and shut out of court favour for years, living in poverty on the charity of friends.

Anne died in 1617 after giving birth to a stillborn child. Her death deepened Donne's religious and existential brooding. Many of his love poems are associated with the early years of the marriage, though such links are often conjectural.

Sir Robert Drury and Lucy, Countess of Bedford were important patrons. Leicester and Sidney belong to an earlier Elizabethan generation, and Southampton is more closely linked with Shakespeare.

Donne was appointed Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in November 1621 and held the post until his death in 1631. He was ordained in 1615, became Royal Chaplain to James I, received a Cambridge D.D. in 1615, and was Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn (1616–1622).

Ordination (1615) → death of Anne More (1617) → Dean of St Paul's (1621) → Donne's death (31 March 1631).

"Death's Duel" was preached in 1631, the year of his death, before Charles I. Donne's sermons drew large crowds and are counted among the greatest in English.

These famous lines come from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), a prose work written after a serious illness. They are not from a sermon, though they are often quoted alongside the sermons.

Ignatius His Conclave (1611) is a satirical prose work aimed at the Jesuits and Ignatius Loyola. Biathanatos was written c. 1608 on suicide, and Pseudo-Martyr (1610) defended the Oath of Allegiance.

The Elegies are frank, sensuous and sometimes meditative, and they were influenced by Ovid's Amores. They should not be confused with the elegiac tradition of mourning.

The Roman satirists Juvenal and Horace shaped Donne's Satires, as Ovid shaped the Elegies.

"Death Be Not Proud" is Holy Sonnet 10, "Batter My Heart" is 14, and "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" is 7. "The Flea" belongs to the Songs and Sonnets. The standard numbering has 19 Holy Sonnets, dealing with death, sin, redemption and divine love.

The Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness is a religious poem. The other three are among the Songs and Sonnets, which deal with love, sex, parting and constancy.

The collection is not a set of true sonnets; it was published posthumously in 1633 in Poems, by J.D. Its themes include love, jealousy, parting, constancy, inconstancy and spiritual love.

Donne's verse is known for abruptness, colloquial rhythms, wit and argumentative structure. Smooth ornamental sweetness is more typical of Spenser-style verse than of Donne's jagged, speech-like lines.

"For God's sake hold your tongue" opens The Canonization, "Mark but this flea" opens The Flea, and "Busy old fool, unruly Sun" opens The Sun Rising. Such abrupt dramatic beginnings are a hallmark of Donne.

Eliot's 1921 essay "The Metaphysical Poets" gave currency to the idea of a "unified sensibility" in Donne. His work and that of the Modernists led to a major twentieth-century revival of Donne's reputation. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" dates from 1919.

Donne's lovers are reciprocal partners, and the poems treat love as transcendent, world-creating and all-sufficient. Petrarchan poetry typically stresses idealized, unattainable adoration.

Dryden remarked that Donne "affects the metaphysics" even in his amorous verses. Samuel Johnson's Life of Cowley (1779), part of Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781), made "metaphysical poets" a standard label, used critically.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. Johnson was critical: he complained of their "combination of dissimilar images" and said their "most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together". He did not praise natural diction.

Centuries of Meditations is by Thomas Traherne. Marvell is known for poems such as "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Garden".

Herbert, Crashaw and Cowley belong to the loose grouping that includes Donne, Marvell, Vaughan and Traherne. Milton is a major seventeenth-century poet but is not counted among them. The grouping is a matter of shared style rather than a formal school.

Petrarchan conceits compare the beloved's features to stars, coral and the like, while metaphysical conceits yoke dissimilar things such as lovers and a pair of compasses. Johnson described the latter as "occult resemblances in things apparently unlike".

The compasses conceit belongs to "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", the flea as marriage bed to "The Flea", and lovers as all states and princes to "The Sun Rising".

A paradox is a statement that seems contradictory but reveals a truth. Here death is said to die, because the resurrection ends death's power.

The poem begins as if the speaker had just been interrupted, with the explosive "B" and a trochaic inversion in "Busy". There is no preface, and the reader is at once in the bedroom.

The aubade is a dawn-song, usually of lovers who must part with the morning. Donne inverts the convention: the speaker will not part, and he scolds the sun for intruding.

The poem has three stanzas of ten lines, thirty lines in all. Each stanza combines a Petrarchan-style quatrain (ABBA), a Shakespearean-style quatrain (CDCD) and a closing couplet (EE).

The speaker is a witty, boastful male lover addressing the sun, personified as an old man, a servant, a busybody and a pedantic wretch. The setting is a bedroom as the sun shines through window and curtains.

The sun stands for time, duty and the outside world, while the lovers claim self-sufficient, timeless love. The stanza-one couplet states that love knows no season, and hours, days and months are the "rags of time".

The mood is erotic, intimate, defiant and cosmic. The speaker's hyperbole and witty irreverence turn at the end into triumphant invitation.

The poem is argumentative: stanza 1 scolds the sun, stanza 2 claims the lover's power over it, and stanza 3 declares that the lovers are the world and invites the sun to shine on them. The structure is typical of the metaphysical lyric.

The speaker speaks to the absent, inanimate sun as if it were a servant or naughty child. This apostrophe is reinforced by the imperatives "go chide", "go tell", "call", and colloquial speech.

The speaker tells the sun to go and chide late schoolboys and sour apprentices, tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, and call country ants to harvest offices. These images of routine social duty are contrasted with love's freedom from time.

Love, the couplet says, knows no season or climate, nor hours, days and months, "which are the rags of time". This denies the sun's power over the lovers.

The hyperbole is that a mere wink would cloud the beams. The speaker refrains only because he would then lose sight of his beloved for so long.

The lines show the range of Donne's geographical imagery. The lover challenges the sun to see whether these two regions of wealth are where it left them or lie here in bed with him.

It is a hyperbolic political conceit: the lovers become all states and princes, and worldly power is only imitation. This links with the Renaissance idea of the microcosm.

Alchemy, the pseudo-science of transmuting base metals into gold, stands for false or counterfeit value. The speaker uses it to deny the worth of honour and wealth.

The small room becomes the cosmos, and the lovers' bed is its centre. Micro- and macrocosm are traditionally paired, so the room is at once tiny and everything.

The speaker says that the sun's age asks for ease and its duty is done in warming the lovers, since the world is "contracted" into them. He ends by inviting the sun to shine there and so be everywhere.

"Reverend" ironically grants the sun a religious dignity, which the speaker promptly undercuts with his claim to eclipse it. The mixture of reverence and irreverence is characteristic of Donne's wit.

The poem draws on eclipses and the sun's sphere, alchemy, the Indies, and kings and states. Intellectual range of this kind is a mark of the metaphysical style.

The 1633 volume also contained the Songs and Sonnets, Elegies, Satires and other verse. It appeared two years after Donne's death.

The dating is uncertain; the poem is generally thought to be after 1601, but such biographical links are conjectural. Its themes of confident, mutual love have led some critics to connect it with the early years of the marriage.

The rhythm is jagged and speech-like. "Busy" inverts the stress at the opening, and the closing couplet of each stanza is longer, which adds emphasis.