Break of Day: An Explication

Foremost, it is intriguing that the poem, written by John Donne, should be in the perspective of a woman. By taking on the persona of the opposite gender, the poet emphasizes his contemplation and comprehension of what a woman might suppose. 

Additionally, the poem is divided into three stanzas, each presenting a slightly different variation of a plea from the woman speaker that her partner stays. The first stanza is playfully entreating, while the second is more earnest, and the last results in an agitated resignation to defeat.

The jocular nature of the first stanza is apparent in the first line alone, as the speaker dismisses daytime lightly: “what though it be?” (1). The speaker also reasons with her lover here, with playful logic, asking why light should entail departure when it was not night that “brought us hither,” (5). The speaker also mentions love, without restraint, and that it should keep them together, and it is this freedom of emotional declaration accompanied by the toying with juxtapositions of light and day that indicates the speaker’s initial pleasant emotion as she asks her lover to remain with her.

The second stanza introduces an air of more urgency to the speaker’s tone: “And that I loved my heart and honor so, That I would not from him that had them go,” (11,12). The mention of honor intensifies the nature of her pleas. Furthermore, the relationship between the speaker and her lover is insinuated in line 8 to be scandalous, if not adulterous, when the speaker personifies the light so that it might “spy”, an action which could be conducted only if there was something unusual occurring to be spied upon.

The final stanza marks a transition in the speaker’s words, namely a shift between positive emotion and clearly negative emotion. In line 14, “Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,” parallels some of the diction in line 2 of the poem, where “Oh, wilt thou therefore rise from me?” first introduces “Oh”, serving to highlight the contrast between the emotions in the two stanzas, the first being cheer and the last being the opposite.

Also, line 15 lists several plights that might usually be considered unforgivable by a prospective lover, including “the poor, the foul, [and] the false.” The harshness of such characteristics, which are deemed to be acceptable by love, contrasts the apparent   of a “busied man,” and emphasizes the speaker’s deep contempt for the latter.

The last two lines of the poem serve as summation of the speaker (and author’s) predominant points and also as a revelation of the scandalous relationship between speaker and lover.  Line 17 shines light on the term “business” as meaning preoccupation, rather than laboring, which is told by the speaker to be foul in relation to making love. Line 18 compares the atrocity of business intertwined with love to an adulterous male, again foretelling that the relationship is adulterous and also demonstrating the speaker’s belief that full attention ought to be paid to a mistress, else the preoccupation be as sinful as the deed of cheating itself. 

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