What Is an Aubade?
Quick answer: An aubade is a dawn poem, traditionally a lover's complaint that morning forces two people apart. Explore its history, famous examples and how to write one.
An aubade is a poem about dawn, and traditionally a poem of parting at dawn: two lovers wake, the light arrives, and the world with its duties and dangers demands that they separate. The word comes through French from the Occitan alba, meaning dawn, and the earliest examples were sung by mediaeval troubadours in what is now southern France. Unlike a sonnet or a villanelle, the aubade is defined by its occasion rather than by any fixed shape. There is no set rhyme scheme, no line count, no required metre. If the poem stands at daybreak and grieves, resents or reckons with what the morning takes away, it is an aubade.
The form has proved astonishingly durable because its central tension never expires. Night is private time, owned by the lovers, the insomniac, the dreamer. Morning is public time, owned by employers, obligations and the rest of the world. Every generation rediscovers that border and writes about the crossing. That is why the aubade has survived eight centuries while dozens of stricter forms have quietly died: it is built on a feeling everyone still has at 6 a.m.
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)
The watchman's warning: where the aubade began
The mediaeval alba had a wonderfully practical premise. In the troubadour songs of the twelfth century, the lovers are usually adulterous, the night has been stolen, and discovery means disgrace or worse. A watchman on the castle wall, often a friend of the lovers, sings out that the sky is lightening and the husband will soon stir. The refrain of many albas is simply the word alba itself, tolling at the end of each stanza like an alarm nobody wants to hear.
This origin explains the form's emotional signature. The dawn in an aubade is never neutral. It is an intruder, an enforcer, sometimes almost a jailer, and the poem's energy comes from resisting it while knowing the resistance is futile. Later poets kept that adversarial dawn even after they dropped the adultery, the castle and the watchman. The machinery changed; the grievance stayed.
Donne tells the sun to mind its own business
The most famous aubade in English opens with a lover shouting at the sun as if it were a nosy neighbour. John Donne's 'The Sun Rising', published in 1633, begins with pure insolence, and it is worth hearing the actual lines.
The joke deepens into a boast. By the poem's end Donne has argued that his bedroom contains everything worth having, so the sun may as well orbit the bed and save itself the trip. It is the aubade turned inside out: instead of mourning that morning ends the lovers' world, Donne declares their world bigger than morning. Nearly four hundred years later, it still reads like the best comeback anyone ever delivered while half asleep.
Romeo, Juliet and the argument about a bird
Shakespeare wrote a dramatic aubade into the most famous love story in the language. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, the newlyweds wake after their single night together and argue about birdsong: Juliet insists the voice they heard was the nightingale, bird of night, while Romeo knows it was the lark, herald of the morning. 'It was the nightingale, and not the lark,' she pleads, because if it is the lark, Romeo must flee Verona or die.
The scene shows why the aubade template is so powerful on stage and off. The lovers are not really debating ornithology; they are negotiating with time itself, trying to talk the night into lasting. Every aubade since contains some version of that bargaining, and every reader recognises it, because everyone has lain awake doing arithmetic against an alarm clock.
The modern aubade: dawn without the lover
In the twentieth century the form widened. The most celebrated modern example is Philip Larkin's 'Aubade', published in 1977, in which the speaker wakes at four in the morning not beside a lover but alone, staring at the ceiling and at the fact of his own mortality. The dawn that arrives brings no parting of lovers, only the resumption of ordinary life with its telephones and offices, while the dread persists underneath. Larkin kept the form's skeleton, the wakeful dark and the unwelcome light, and swapped the beloved for death. The poem is under copyright, so read it in a library or an authorised anthology; it rewards the trip.
Contemporary poets have kept stretching the occasion. There are aubades for night shift workers clocking off as the world clocks on, aubades for new parents feeding a baby at first light, aubades set in hospital wards where dawn means another round of observations. The constant is the threshold. Whenever a poem stands at the border between night and day and counts what is lost in the crossing, it belongs to this family.
What every good aubade needs
Because the aubade has no formal rules, its craft lives in a handful of pressures the poem must create and hold. Most successful examples, from the troubadours to last year's journals, manage all four of these.
Writing your own aubade
Start by choosing what your dawn takes away, because that decision is the poem. It need not be a lover. It might be the last hour of quiet before children wake, the end of a night drive, the final morning in a flat you are leaving, the moment a hospital vigil hands you back to ordinary time. The stakes can be small; the border cannot.
Then write the light like a character with intentions. Here is an original micro-example of the register: The radiators knock awake. Your shoulder turns from me into the working day. Two lines, and the day is already an accomplice pulling one person away from another. Draft your poem in present tense first, since the aubade thrives on the illusion that dawn is happening now, and keep your verbs doing the resenting. If you want a deadline to finish against, a dawn poem travels well in competition: Writory's monthly contest scores emotion and language directly, and few subjects carry emotion as reliably as first light on the day you dreaded.
What poets can take from this
- Decide what your dawn takes away before you write a single line; that loss is the poem's engine.
- Write in present tense so the light seems to strengthen as the reader moves down the page.
- Give the dawn physical evidence: milk floats, grey curtains, first buses, a phone charging to full.
- Let the speaker bargain with time somewhere in the poem, the way Juliet argues about the lark.
- Resist a consoling ending; the honest aubade concedes the day without pretending to welcome it.
- Read Donne for defiance and Larkin for dread, then find your own register between them.
Try it yourself
Write an aubade set in the last ten minutes before an alarm goes off, in which the speaker lies awake beside someone, or beside an empty space, negotiating with the light for more time.
Questions
Is an aubade a fixed form like a sonnet?
No. An aubade is defined by its occasion, dawn and what dawn costs, rather than by any set structure. You can write one in free verse, couplets, blank verse or even as a sonnet; the label describes the situation and mood, not the architecture.
What is the opposite of an aubade?
The serenade, an evening song addressed to a lover, is the traditional counterpart, and the nocturne, a night piece, is the aubade's closest cousin in mood. Where the aubade resents the arriving light, the nocturne settles into darkness and explores it.
Why is Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' so famous?
Because it took a form built for lovers' partings and aimed it at mortality instead, waking alone before dawn and facing death without comfort. Many readers consider it one of the great English poems of the late twentieth century, and it permanently widened what the aubade could be about.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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