Controlling the Sun

In Renaissance Christian writing, God is commonly compared to the sun, but how the sun figured in religious meditations varied. One test case for unearthing these differences is how poets contemplated the meaning of a solar eclipse. In Pulter’s Aurora [2]37 the speaker says of Night:

Hester Pulter, Aurora [2]

She too long laps us in her sable veil,
Which makes me fear confused chaos might
Involve this globe (once more) in shades of night.
Fool that I am, so foolishly to think,
As if ’twere dark because my eyes do wink.

Here the speaker reprimands herself for thinking that she might be in control of an ever-encompassing cosmic darkness, as if it is the simple product of winking. The idea that a person might supersede the sun is treated more satirically in the second stanza of John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”:

John Donne, The Sun Rising

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

She’s all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Source: luminarium.org

Donne treats the spiritual inability to connect to God, figured as the sun, more earnestly in “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward,” where the speaker’s anguished turning away from the sun signals a complex relation to God:

John Donne
Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward

Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul’s form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul’s, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnish’d thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom’d us?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They’re present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and Thou look’st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformit ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face.

Source: luminarium.org

Pulter’s poem blends Christian and classical allusions in ways that offer various, sometimes competing, theories of accountability for the eclipse of the sun’s light. In line 31, the speaker reminds the moon that it is subject to the Parcae, the three classical Fates who spin the threads of destiny. As this 1561 print by Cornelius Cort (after Giulio Romano) demonstrates, the female Fates could be imagined in muscular corporeal form.

The Fates sit with Clotho spinning, Lachesis measuring the thread, and Atropos preparing to cut it.

Cornelius Cort, De Drie Schikgodinnen Klotho, Lachesis en Atropos, 1561. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.