22 pages • 44-minute read
Break of Day
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Themes
The Persuasion of Physical Love
This is—and is not—a love poem. Surely the two characters are drawn together by love. But Donne does not merely hymn the wonder of love. There is no doubt the two characters in “Break of Day” have spent the night together “hooking up,” to use a euphemism that Donne would not have known. The poem never makes clear the relationship—but given the era’s predisposition to regarding marriage as a brokered contract rather than as a powerful, even sacred expression of love, and given Donne’s own brief fling as a bohemian during his early twenties, the most likely scenario is two lovers rather than spouses, most likely working-class folks given the man’s urgency to get to work. But there might be another reason for his special urgency to get out of the woman’s bed now at the break of dawn—among the responsibilities the man might be attending to may be the return to his wife, suggested by the withering wit of the woman’s closing put-down. The only thing worse than a lover stealing from a shared bed would be a married man seeking out his mistress.
What could make a man even temporarily abandon his sense of responsibilities and his duties? What could make a woman so direct, so petulant in her demand for her lover’s attentions? Love maybe, but definitely physical love. What is unusual here is how frankly the poem treats the persuasive bond of physical love. In an era that regarded love as more of a sacred expression, here the woman who delivers the rebuke to the man who must hurry off frankly admits that they have shared the bed, have laid together throughout the night—for Renaissance poetry quite racy stuff.
The poem withholds judgment—the poem in the opening stanza recreates a sense of the lovers’ cozy nest, their bed where they expressed their love in decidedly physical terms, the bed the woman is reluctant to abandon, inviting her lover, or perhaps given his dedication to his responsibilities, tempting her lover to give in and make love all over again now in the warm light of just-morning, an image all the more erotic because the woman is left hanging, denied what she so deeply yearns for.
The Pull of Responsibility/Priorities
Choose, the woman says, my bed or your job. It is a difficult, really impossible request to prioritize. When the speaker, a woman still reclining in bed after a satisfying night of lovemaking, chides her lover for choosing to depart at the first break of dawn to attend to his assorted responsibilities, what she coolly calls his “business” (Line 17), and even dismisses that commitment as worse than a lover being poor or even unfaithful, it seems a decidedly unfair choice, an either/or dilemma imposed on what is just common sense: No matter how satisfying the sex, a person cannot live on passion alone.
The poem, however, presents the dilemma as not only fair but inevitable. In a poem defined by its questions, the one that the woman never directly asks looms critical: what specifically is more important than our lovemaking? The speaker claims she would never depart their bed for something so trivial as work, but that claim is a bit moot as within the culture that defined Donne’s era it would be more likely the man would be expected to attend to business. So she is in effect demanding something she herself will never be asked to do. And because the poem is not actually delivered (as in a play or a movie), the reader is uncertain what tone the woman uses. Is she flirty and teasing, knowing her man will return as soon as he can?; or is she taunting, condemning her lover as something less than a lover?; or if the business her lover must return to as he sneaks out just after dawn is to return to his wife, is the speaker wounded, hurt, feeling abandoned, and perhaps even a bit angry?
At any event, the poem’s theme is ultimately a fantasy. Yes, it would be grand to live on our passion, but... Inevitably, there is a “but.” That (im)possible choice centers the poem’s theme.
The Role of Sexual Power
To a modern reader coming to Donne’s poem about two lovers parting at daybreak after a night of lovemaking, it might seem obvious, even factual, to see how the poem accepts the sexual power of the female narrator. Conditioned now by nearly a century of political and social activism as well as an ever-widening canon of literary texts that have explored the sexual psyche of women, to note that a poem has as its thematic core the idea that, yes, a woman can be sexual might seem to trivialize that poem.
However, in Donne’s time, women were not accorded the right to be sexual. Drawing on a literary (as well as socio-cultural) tradition, women were suspended in a kind of vacuum apart from and above the often messy sexual politics of a world where men held power in all aspects. The tradition, most often termed courtly love (although like the term Metaphysical poets, that term came centuries after Donne’s era), imbued women with the sort of grace associated with (and drawn from) Christian perceptions of the elevated female, figures of moral and spiritual status who drew the attention of men and, in turn, defined a kind of spiritual love. Women in much of the love poetry of Donne’s era did not really seem to have a body at all—they offered their heart, certainly, and they sustained a kind of spiritual aura, but they certainly did not crave hasty sexual encounters before their lover heads off to work. Women seemed more abstract, more ethereal. That was what the lyrics of poets back to Petrarch celebrated.
Donne certainly did not need to make the speaker the woman. In doing so, however, he altered the thematic argument. It is the woman who wants to linger in bed enjoying anything-but-spiritual love with the lover, who is, for his part, hastening out the front door. I would not go, the speaker chides her lover, I would never leave our bed, whatever our love might do to damage my honor and my heart. Take out the bed as the focal setting of the poem, and the poem is far more traditional. With the bed and with the man slipping out the door, the poem testifies to what Donne’s culture played down: Women have as much agency as men.
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