Here is the poem:

The Sun Rising
By John Donne

           Busy old fool, unruly sun,
           Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

           Thy beams, so reverend and strong
           Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

           She's all states, and all princes, I,
           Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44129/the-sun-rising

For more on Donne:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

Professor Kirk read Edith Grossman's translation of "Sonnet 189" from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works. Copyright (c) 2014 by Edith Grossman. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

To learn more about Stephanie Kirk’s scholarship, you can click here.

Cover image: Miguel Cabrera, posthumous portrait of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, 1750. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, Mexico. Public domain.

We link our discussion to present-day concerns about social media, the Surgeon General's warning about an epidemic of loneliness in this country, and a long-term Harvard study of happiness. Links below.

Here is the poem:

Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Links to the Surgeon General's Warning about Social Media

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/23/1177626373/u-s-surgeon-general-vivek-murthy-warns-about-the-dangers-of-social-media-to-kids#:~:text=Social%20media%20can%20present%20a,a%20new%20advisory%20released%20Tuesday.

Various Links on the Harvard Happiness Study

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/harvard-happiness-study-relationships/672753/

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/10/85-year-harvard-study-found-the-secret-to-a-long-happy-and-successful-life.html

https://www.reuters.com/markets/wealth/what-worlds-longest-happiness-study-says-about-money-2023-02-06/

Links:

• Sonnet 29
• Surgeon General on Loneliness
• Surgeon General on Social Media
• Harvard Study of Happiness

To learn more about Shakespeare's sonnets, visit Folger Shakespeare page.

Our favorite editions of Shakespeare's sonnets are edited by Colin Burrow and Stephen Booth.

Sir Patrick Stewart's reading of Sonnet 73 is one of our favorites.

Here is the poem:

On my First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

To learn more about the magnificent Ben Jonson, check this page on the British Library website.

To learn more about couplets, epigrams, elegies, and apostrophes, click this page on the Academy of American Poets website.

For the text of this poem, click here.

Colin Burrow and Stephen Booth's editions of Shakespeare's sonnets are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about this amazing sonnet sequence.

During the pandemic, Sir Patrick Stewart has read one Shakespeare sonnet each day and share it on YouTube. To hear him read Sonnet 116 and so many others, click here.

In this episode we discuss her work with emblems, her scientific chemistry experiment with flowers, and her wonderment (both worried and confident, doubtful and awestruck) about the resurrection of the body and its reunification with the soul after death.

For a biography of Hester Pulter, see here:
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/about-hester-pulter-and-the-manuscript.html

For her poems, see the Pulter Project here:
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/

Here is the text of today's poem:

"View But This Tulip" (Emblem 40)

View but this tulip, rose, or gillyflower,
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
These flowers into their chaos were retired
Till human art them raised and reinspired
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Shut up the ashes under Hermes’s seal;
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
You may reanimate at your desire
These gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass:
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
To recreate a Virbius of a flower,
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
Our dormant dust, and keep alive the same
With an all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
Then, though I into atoms scattered be,
In indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory
By Nature’s paths, but God from death and night
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see.
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies,
Incapable of quick’ning till it dies,
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give
Their treasures up, my body too shall live:
Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire,
Where men revive, then straight of life despair;
But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite
And ne’er involvéd be with death and night,
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee,
My gracious God, to all eternity.
Then at thy dissolution patient be:
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.

THE TEXT

John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton

Here is the poem in full:

THE COLLAR

I struck the board, and cried, "No more;
I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load."
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied My Lord.

For more on George Herbert, visit the poetry foundation.

"In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665 Being a Year and a Half Old"

Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,
Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta'en away unto eternity.
Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate,
Or sigh the days so soon were terminate;
Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.

By nature trees do rot when they are grown.
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.

For more on Anne Bradstreet, please see the Poetry Foundation.

For an essay on Anne Bradstreet's art, please see this short piece by Kevin Prufer.

For an essay on Anne Bradstreet's publication of The Tenth Muse (the first published book by a woman from British North America) and her ambitions as a poet, see this piece by Charlotte Gordon.

For an understanding of Puritan spirituality, please see this short review essay by Abram Van Engen.

Links:

• Anne Bradstreet | Poetry Foundation
• On Anne Bradstreet
• Humble Assertions: The True Story of Anne Bradstreet’s Publication of The Tenth Muse - Commonplace - The Journal of early American Life
• The Law and the Gospel - Commonplace - The Journal of early American Life

John Donne was an influential metaphysical poet who enjoyed wide fame in his own day, then went largely unread for two centuries, and then, saw his reputation radically revived in the early twentieth century. He was born into a Catholic family, converted to Anglicanism, and became a minister. Along the way, he wrote both "secular" erotic love poems and "religious" poems of many forms. This poem is one of the nineteen "Holy Sonnets" he wrote.

For a sequence on sonnets, this episode caps a mini-sequence in Poetry For All, which included a sonnet of Shakespeare's (episode 4), a reconception of the sonnet tradition by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay (episode 5), a set of erasure poems drawn from Shakespeare's sonnets by Jen Bervin (episode 6), and a return to the seventeenth-century sonnet tradition with John Donne (episode 7).

For more on John Donne, please see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

Links:

• John Donne | Poetry Foundation
• Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God… | Poetry Foundation

For the sonnet in full, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day

For helpful works on Shakespeare's sonnets, see:

Stephen Booth's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets

and

Helen Vendler's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets.