22 pages • 44 minutes read
Break of Day
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Moonlight/Sunlight
The poem pivots on the movement from night to day. The poem develops a dynamic in which both temporal moments become symbolic. The night represents cozy intimacy, the delectable promise of lovemaking, and the feel of secret and protected privacy. But moonlight proves an illusion. The break of dawn, the sudden introduction of hard sunlight, which obviously cannot be stopped, shatters that intimacy and that privacy.
With sunlight the man knows it is time to leave, that the night-world of their lovemaking was never meant to endure, never meant to last. For the man, sunlight symbolizes real-time, real-world complications, the inevitable call to duty, the dreary need to be about the dreary business of another dreary day. “Must business thee from hence remove?” (Line 13), the woman asks. The tone is uncertain—she may be hurt, or angry, or perhaps stunned. Thus, for the woman sunlight represents that hard epiphany, that moment when she realizes her lover intends to depart, intends to refuse her offer to show the sun what they showed the moon, the intensity of their passion. For her, the sunlight represents an illumination of a much different kind. Even as her lover presumably heads out into the morning sun, the woman is left alone awash in the glare of sunlight that has revealed the emptiness of what she hoped was the serious business of love.
Business
The nature of the man’s “business” (Line 13), which the woman so scornfully dismisses, is never actually made clear. Given the urgency with which the man leaves at first break of day, he is most likely not much above the working class, where expectations were set by long hours and where tardiness risked losing that position.
If that is in fact the case, the poem raises a disturbing kind of question, a kind of word puzzle intended not to be solved so much as acknowledged: How do lovers say goodbye? Any loving couple must face those moments inevitably when they must part. Although much love poetry in Donne’s age focused on lovers facing imminent departure and the tragedy of approaching loneliness and yearning, here Donne scales back the tragedy. After all, the man is going to work not off to war, nor is he dying. Although it is possible (there is no textual evidence one way or the other) that the business he is rushing off to attend to is nothing less than his wife, even within that scenario there is the promise of returning soon. So, the poem poses a tricky proposition: how much depends on how lovers part even for the briefest time. The man never speaks, never answers any of the woman’s pointed questions, offers no feedback, no response, nothing save the furious busyness of getting ready to leave. Although stepping beyond the parameter of the poem is always risky and really something of a parlor, imagine how the woman will greet the man when he invariably returns to her bed after taking care of his business.
Why rise just because the sun is up, she asks plaintively. Will not your business keep if we linger just a bit? That he does not give in to her fetching offer indicates that, for all the wondrous lovemaking the poem suggests the two have enjoyed, the poem in the end endorses the pragmatics of real-time responsibilities, the pressing priority to take care of business.
The Bed
For Renaissance poets, the bed in which two lovers recline symbolized pretty much the same thing as it does in the 21st century. This bed, which is presumably happily disheveled and thus still coaxing and inviting, warm and cozy, symbolizes the private space of lovers. Given the pressing reality of the dawn breaking through the bedroom windows, shattering the room’s enclosing and welcoming darkness, the bed symbolizes the impermanence of such respite love, the paradox of how it seems at its peak that sexual activity can suspend time and deny place as the lovers tumble together in the happy non-time and un-space of sex. With the rude intrusion of the sun it becomes, well, another room in the house, another room with a door.
The bed is never actually described. The poem relies on the collective cultural perception of what the mussed-up bed and all those mussed-up sheets, tossed pillows, and thrown blankets suggest. That suggestion is carried by the woman’s argument. We did not make love because it was night, why part because it is day? The dawn cannot betray us because sunlight has no voice, right? Our bed is still warm, still persuasive. To depart your lover’s bed to go to work, she argues, is worse than cheating. That love is clearly divided. Your work is your mistress. That compelling argument centers on the speaker’s hopes to make the bed itself so fetching, so coaxing, that there is in its invitation to return to their lovemaking something the man cannot resist. That he nevertheless does resist reveals Donne’s pragmatic sensibility—or perhaps the cold logic of a one-night stand. The bed and all it represents to lovers is limited; deep in its rewards, perhaps, but shallow in its promise.
Unlock all 22 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By John Donne
