Break of Day

“Break of Day” is an exceptional kind of love poem both for its time and for a contemporary reader. Indeed, within the tradition of love lyrics that dated three centuries before Donne’s time, the premise of this love poem is radical. Here is a love poem in which no one kisses anyone, no one makes protestations of affection, no one swoons in the arms of their beloved. And it is a distinctly erotic poem in which no one makes love, no one holds each other, no pulsating, heaving body parts are engaged. In fact, it is a love poem where the only thing the lovers actually do is quarrel and part company.

In this, Donne’s poem works a twist on conventional love lyrics. It is a reactive poem, not an active poem. Imagine, the poem argues, given the intensity of their quarrel and how reluctant one lover is to even leave the bed where they have made love, imagine the emotions they feel, imagine the love they made. It is as if the reader measures the depth of an explosion by picking through the rubble. It is a morning after poem that hints at the wonderful night before. What is your hurry to leave, one lover asks, why make the sun our enemy? The moon was not our friend, love was. That love is still here, the speaker argues, in the hard wash of the morning light. A love poem without any demonstrations of love, an erotic celebration of the carnal appetite without any muscle or sweat, any friction at all. Yet the poem delivers the tonic feel of the love the two share but only ironically, only by indirection. It takes dawn to suggest the night.

In addition to playing a variation on the conventional love poem, the poem upends cultural-deep expectations about gender and sex. The speaker is a woman. It is the woman who tries to coax more sex. Although contemporary readers, aware of the long and difficult struggle women have had for liberation and equality, readers in Elizabethan England, drawing on centuries of Christian beliefs about women and of course the template of their Virgin Queen, typically denied women the right to be emotionally complex, the right to be the aggressor, the right to be sexually engaged, the right to want to linger in bed with a lover. A woman may flirt, bat her eyes, heave her breasts, or maybe tease. But women, within the courtly love tradition that had defined love poetry during the Renaissance, were considered best defined as “ladies,” noble, beautiful in an almost supernal way, treasured and elevated, sought after, dreamed about, fought over, respected, adored—but not taken to bed and certainly not demanding to—what’s the appropriate High Renaissance term?—to do the paphian jig. And certainly no woman would ever taunt a man to stay in her bed, pester that man to linger in lovemaking rather than attend to those manly duties of responsible living. A woman never acknowledged the urgencies, the sheer power, the reward of physical love. It should be the man demanding the woman linger—a poetic situation Donne often used—that, by Renaissance gender definitions, would at least be understandable. Men, after all, pursue, men are rogues, men are bohemians; women fall in love, men have sex, men find the animal logic of carnal congress essential to their makeup. But here it is the woman who speaks, the woman who seeks. The poem offers no filter, no overarching (male) author-ity there to scold the woman, to place some kind of cautionary moral frame around the woman’s bald pleadings for the man to return to her bed, to resume their lovemaking. Morning sun does not quench her sexual appetite—indeed, it only increases it.

The woman dismisses as trivial and distracting the man’s pressing need to get back to the real-time world of expectations, the dreary routine of his duties. Those duties, which a Renaissance culture would respect as the responsibilities of men to carry on the operations of the day to day, conflict with what the woman argues is a far higher and far more rewarding experience, not love (within the Renaissance culture that term meant little as marriages were brokered more like business deals) but rather the exquisite fire of sexual expression. In fact, this sultry and hungry woman in effect demands the man choose between his duties and their lovemaking.

Because the poem ends not with a reconciliation and certainly not with a return to the bed or even a passionate kiss goodbye but rather with the woman’s veiled sort of threat to end the relationship (the man, after all, makes his choice and prepares to depart), it is unclear where sympathies should rest. The woman, empowered and calling the shots, in the end understands that this magnificent lover has failed her. For choosing the world and for rushing off too quickly, too casually, to those endless and pointless rounds of duties over making love with her, he is, in her estimation, worse than lovers who are broke, who are uncouth, and even those charismatic players able to manipulate multiple lovers at a time. You, she sniffs, you are worse.

Of course, that conclusion raises some larger issues: what is the man to do? Except in fluffy Valentine’s Day cards and saccharine wedding toasts, a person cannot live on love alone. Because of the first-person perspective, no resolution is possible. The woman closes the poem dismissing her lover, contemptuous of his devotion to duty, and resigned at least for the moment to see this lover in a decidedly unflattering (sun)light. In this, the poem uses the break of dawn and the return of illumination to suggest this epiphany, one that happens off-stage, happens without the woman, despite her role as the speaker, detailing the implications of her realization. We understand what the lover does not, indeed what he most likely will never glimpse. He is, in the end, just another man.