Love’s Short Day: Romance and Illumination in the “Light Sequence” of John Donne’s Poems

This article builds on the work of scholars such as Arthur Marotti and Ernest Sullivan, using manuscript contexts to inform readings of John Donne’s poetry. I present a study of what I call the “light sequence” of John Donne’s poems, an arrangement of three poems—“Breake of Day,” “The Sunne Rising,” and “A Lecture upon the Shadow”—that appears in seven manuscripts compiled during Donne’s lifetime, two of which have a tangential connection to Donne. These manuscripts contextualize interpretations for their contemporary readers that critics have yet to consider partly because the poems never appear in this arrangement in print editions. In particular, this light sequence supports a reading where Donne’s poems innovate on and surpass his classical model, Ovid’s Amores 1.13. More broadly, this case study demonstrates one way scholars might employ manuscript studies to bridge a gap between modern editorial practices and early modern readership.