Aubade
Quick answer: An aubade is a dawn poem, traditionally spoken by lovers forced to part at daybreak. Explore the form from the troubadour alba to Donne and Larkin.
An aubade is a dawn poem: traditionally the complaint of lovers who must part at daybreak, and by extension any poem set at first light that weighs what morning takes away. The form descends from the alba of the Provencal troubadours, in which a watchman warns two lovers that the sun is coming and the world, with its husbands and duties, is waking up. The French gave it the name aubade, from aube, dawn.
The aubade endures because its situation never dates. Dawn is still the border where private joy meets public obligation, and the alarm clock has only sharpened the old drama. The form is also gloriously flexible: it has held seduction, protest, prayer and dread, all timed to the same hour.
The poem
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
John Donne, 'The Sun Rising' (1633)
How It Works
The classic aubade runs on resistance: the lovers argue with the light, deny it, curse it, bargain with it. Shakespeare stages a perfect one in Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet insists the bird they heard was the nightingale of night, and Romeo, who must be gone by dawn or die, knows it was the lark.
The deep engine is time made audible. Whatever the poem says, its real subject is the fact that hours end, which is why the aubade sits so close to elegy.
Where You Will See It
John Donne owns the form's comic summit: The Sun Rising scolds the sun as a busy old fool and orders it to go bother schoolboys and courtiers instead of the lovers' bed. His Break of Day gives the parting argument to the woman, a rarity worth studying.
In the twentieth century Philip Larkin's Aubade turned the form inside out: the speaker wakes at four to soundless dark and confronts not a lover's departure but mortality itself, the one dawn thought the tradition had been holding at bay. Most contemporary aubades are written in the shadow of both Donne and Larkin.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Set the poem in the exact minutes of transition, streetlights still on, first buses, the room turning grey, because the aubade lives on liminal detail. Give the light a character to argue with: intruder, official, thief, witness. And decide what dawn costs your speaker, a person, a freedom, an illusion, since an aubade with nothing at stake is just a weather report. Dawn poems arrive in Writory's monthly queue constantly; the ones that score on emotion are those where morning genuinely takes something.
What poets can take from this
- Fix the poem at a precise pre-dawn minute and let details do the timekeeping.
- Personify the light so your speaker has an opponent to address.
- Make the parting concrete: name what the day will take.
- Try reversing the tradition, a speaker who longs for dawn, and see what changes.
- Read Donne's The Sun Rising and Larkin's Aubade together to map the form's whole range.
Try it yourself
Write an aubade set during a night shift's final hour, where dawn means losing the strange privacy of the sleeping world; let your speaker address the sunrise directly at least twice.
Questions
What is the difference between an aubade and a serenade?
Timing and direction. A serenade is an evening song offered under a lover's window as night begins; an aubade is a dawn song about parting as night ends. One invites, the other mourns.
Does an aubade have a fixed form or rhyme scheme?
No. The aubade is defined by situation and hour, not by any set stanza, metre or rhyme. Donne, Shakespeare and Larkin all use different structures; the dawn is the only fixed requirement.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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