Response To Tone: Poem Analysis

The question of whether a man should focus on personal work or love and his lover is posed as early as in the first sentence of the poem where Donne states, “‘Tis true, ‘tis day; what thought it be?” In conversational tone, I found the structure of this line very unique as it from a lover to her beloved stating that yes, darkness and night has become light and day, but why should that bring any change to the structure of their love. The narrator is trying to pursue her lover to stay in bed with her although it is long after sunrise. The narrator, sticking with this question based pattern goes to question the bind of their love during the night if it breaks the second that light is shown. In one aspect, I focused on the transition between night to day as a time that furthers a lover from their loved ones because of outside responsibilities or chores. In another aspect, I concentrated towards the importance of light versus darkness representing secrecy in …show more content…
The idea that in many urban setting during Donne’s time, the male figure would be the one who went out to work in an outside setting. The narrative using the last sentence to use the state that a person who works more than they love their wife as equal to a person with a mistress and since most mistressed were women, the last lines helped me cycle back to my primary hypothesis that the narrator was a female. This doesn’t change much of the central themes in the poem that Donne created, but it could add onto the our analyzation of the poem and its implications of gender norms and understanding why a female would desire to keep her companion in a setting that allows men to freely do what they want without gender constraints, and expects a woman to stay at home and fulfill her responsibilities to her family and husband first, and then maybe