22 pages • 44 minutes read
John DonneBreak of Day
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“To His Mistress Going to Bed” by John Donne (posthumous 1633)
This Donne poem is a far more conventional and far more straightforward version of the dynamic between lovers explored in “Break of Day”: specifically, the dynamic of one lover eager to make love, the other not so much. In this, the man is the pursuer, not the woman, and his request to his lover to have sex now is so clear Donne feared publishing this. Like “Break of Day,” one lover lays out the case for why they should have sex, but in this case the one doing the arguing is the man to a woman, more in line with cultural gender expectations, reluctant to concede to the request.
“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell (posthumous 1681)
One of Donne’s peers, another Elizabethan poet defined later as a Metaphysical poet, Marvell presents his own version of a lover frustrated by his lover’s refusal to engage in sex. The argument is artful and elaborate—if we lived forever, if we had time enough, this coaxing game you are insisting on playing would be cute and even erotic. But we do not have the time. Again, the dynamic is the traditional one Donne’s era (and perhaps still our own) is more comfortable with: The man pursues the woman. It is a forceful argument: Make love now, he says, because time is forever moving.
“Aubade” by Amy Lowell (1914)
One of the most famous contemporary aubades, from one of the generation of Modernists who delighted in the discovery of John Donne’s poetry in the early decades of the 20th century, this very modern iteration on the form is interesting for two reasons: Lowell was quite vocal in her admiration of Donne and readily admitted the influence of his love poetry on hers, and like Donne’s “Break of Day,” this iteration is frankly told from a woman’s perspective and uses the kind of elaborate (and erotic) metaphors for sex (comparing exposing the ready penis to breaking a white almond free of its green husk) that Donne would no doubt have found delightful.
Further Literary Resources
“‘This Bed, thy Center Is, These Walls, Thy Spheare’: Metaphysical Unification in the Love Poetry of John Donne’” by Neil Watson (2018)
This essay provides a sweeping look at the tension in Donne’s love poetry between the secular and the sacred, that is between the all-too-human needs of sensual love and the persistent notion that the body cannot possibly be the end of love. Although “Break of Day” is not specifically examined, the argument here explores Donne’s poetry in the years of his early twenties and concludes that Donne did not choose which kind of love to follow but rather opted to fuse elements of the flesh with elements of the spiritual. The female narrator in “Break of Day” reveals this tension, her needs more than fleshly and yet less than transcendent.
“John Donne’s Poetic Philosophy of Love” by David Naugle (2011)
The article presents a helpful overview of Donne’s approach to love and particularly the yearnings of the flesh as an expression of the yearning of the heart, and even the soul. The article suggests Donne, despite his reputation as something of a roue, examined love less as a physical thing and more as an idea, or actually an ideal. The article concludes that Donne was neither a lover nor a thinker but rather an example of a “psychological poet,” anticipating contemporary poets who explored how lovers struggle to make their frankly biological urgencies fit within a greater, spiritual template.
“The Sexual and the Spiritual in John Donne's Poetry: Exploring ‘The Extasie’ and its Analogues” by Basil Thommen (2014)
This is a cohesive analysis of the voice in Donne’s love poetry, how often a character (as in “Break of Day”) yearns for physical love to mask a deeper, spiritual need and how often Donne’s poetry that appears to celebrate so frankly and unapologetically the physical in love is actually an examination of the spiritual elements of the erotic impulses. The article examines particularly the concept of “ecstasy” and how that apparently physical experience reflects the idea of the spiritual fulfillment. Using a variety of both theologians and Catholic saints, the article reveals how Donne, a lifelong student of the wisdom literatures of Christianity, worked to make the flesh radiant with the spiritual.
Listen to Poem
Although there is no shortage of readings of this poem (usually illustrated with gauzy images of sunrise or stern images of Donne himself), finding a reading that actually matches Donne’s poem is tricky. Interesting at least from a gender studies perspective, nearly all of the readings of Donne’s poem available through the Internet are done by male readers despite the obvious: In the poem, the speaker is a woman.
Since the poem was originally designed to be a song, there are several videos of the poet as a ballad, but again the singers are either male or the composition is done by a choral group. The most prominent, the choral version with lute and keyboard accompaniment that was composed, in large part, by John Dowland (1563-1626), has been recorded most successfully by the Louisiana State University Mixed Choral. However, the lushy chords and largo tempo sacrifice the urgencies of the speaker’s complaints and therefore censor the woman’s intemperate argument.
One of the best readings is the Donne a Day version on YouTube. It actually features a woman speaker—although it lacks any production value (Professor Yulia Ryzhik of the Department of English at the University of Toronto reads the poem straight into the camera framed only by shelves of books), the delivery is spot-on, hitting each pause and relishing the difficult task of posing what the speaker too quickly realizes are little more than rhetorical questions.
Related Titles
By John Donne
