Break of Day

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

“Break of Day” is what contemporary literary scholars would term an aubade. Donne plays a variation on a verse form that, although it had existed for more than two centuries by his era, would not actually be categorized and defined until more than two centuries after his death. The aubade, which comes from the French word for morning song, is a poem about the moment when, with the coming of the dawn, lovers who have spent the night together must depart from each other. Usually one of the lovers, most often the female, is still asleep. Traditionally, the enemy is the bright, unforgiving breaking white light of the sun; indeed the word “aubade” derives from a Latin word meaning “white.” In that way, an aubade both is and is not a love poem. The depth of the lovers’ goodbye alone measures the depth of the lovers’ emotions. The measure of how I love you is how reluctantly I must leave you.

In its way, the aubade juxtaposes intimacy with isolation, love with loneliness, satisfaction with emptiness. The poem takes place at that moment in the difficult in-between, lovers suddenly, awkwardly too distant from the magic of love and too near the reality of separation. It is a complex and traumatic look back as the lovers move toward the inevitable moment of departure. In an aubade, most often the man lingers over the night’s activities, lust sated, and surveys the morning world with regret and with the eager, sometimes overeager, promise to hasten back with the night.

In this poem, Donne plays several important variations on the aubade form. First, the speaker is very much awake and able to make a case against departure. More important, Donne offers the perspective of the woman being left behind rather than of the man leaving. Most important, the poem leaves unanswered whether the man will ever return. Is this goodbye, or is this see you soon? The speaker’s passionate argument to extend their interlude together may, in the end, be of little consequence. In this aubade, the white glare of morning light appears to win.

Meter

Metrically, the poem is a song; indeed, it has on multiple occasions been transcribed into music, sung most often as an Adele-styled power ballad or a Taylor Swift-styled vulnerable folk feel. Whichever delivery, the meter sustains a musical feel. The poem is set in three sestets, that is, in three stanzas with six lines each. With few exceptions, each line ends with an end punctuation, a comma, a period, and given the speaker’s interrogatory mode to drive her argument, question marks. That creates the feel of a song, allowing the delivery to move toward convenient closure, or breaks, for each new line of the woman’s argument.

Donne executes the rhyme scheme in tight two-line couplets within each sestet: AA BB CC. Further, the metric patterns in the lines alternate: The first four lines of each sestet carries four beats, and the closing couplet carries five beats, like the verse and chorus of a song. The pattern compels the recitation (or the performance) to linger over the closing two lines that give special import to those lines. That metrical pattern suggests a problem/solution set-up. In each sestet, the first four lines set up a problem—morning is breaking; the dawn’s light cannot bear witness against us; you want to leave and attend to your responsibilities. And the closing two lines offer the implications of that problem and in turn define the speaker’s defiant solution/answer—dawn is breaking? love does not respond to light; dawn does not have eyes, so I will not be the one to depart; but because you will be, you are the most disappointing kind of lover.

Voice

Although risky to assume a poem voiced in first person reflects the poet’s exact experience or can reveal the poet’s intention, readers are likely to assume that a first-person speaker shares at least the gender of the poet. It is the voice of this aubade where Donne breaks most dramatically from that tradition. John Donne is a man who, given what contemporary readers know about his private life, could easily have written an aubade from a male perspective. The decision to shift to the perspective of the woman being left rather than the man creates a sympathy for a figure in the aubade that is most often objectified—the woman, reduced to a thing the man abandons.

The voice here creates not just sympathy for the woman being left but also creates what Donne’s era seldom allowed a woman in such relationships: genuine complexity. The speaker makes her case, line to line, as she poses her questions that stay stubbornly rhetorical as the man never engages in any response as he, presumably, hastily gathers his clothes to make his departure. The speaker moves quickly from the opening two lines in which she speaks in the gentle voice of sated love and the quiet satisfaction of the sexual experience (the opening lines repeat “tis true” to suggest a languorous, lingering feeling) before expressing puzzlement, then astonishment, then, in quick succession, anger, desperation, and ultimately taunting insolence. She is each and all of these emotions, the poem creating a kind of woman not that familiar to Renaissance audiences, a woman who refuses to be a commodity, something used, something bargained for, something adored, rather a woman who in the honesty of her emotional register insists on her right to be complex and wonderfully contradictory.