With the severity of a judge delivering a sentence, in the final lines Donne passes down his verdict: ‘death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.’ As with the pounding of the gavel, there is a distinct severity and finality of tone. The speaker has seen past the veil and found nothing to fear. He is now free.
Hello all. Here is a short, line-by-line commentary of John Donne’s classic poem, Death Be Not Proud. Paid subscribers will be able to read the entirety of the commentary. I really am so grateful for your support. Mentioned below is also a brief description of the writer himself, and of the poetic form (the sonnet) that he had mastered. I hope you enjoy!
John Donne
John Donne (1572-1631) was an English writer and Anglican cleric who wrote primarily during the Jacobean era, and is best known for his devotional and spiritual use of the sonnet form. He accomplished this most notably in his corpus of Divine Poems, the Holy Sonnets. Of the nineteen sonnet’s within this collection, I will be focusing on Donne’s most existential work, Death Be Not Proud, written in 1609 whilst he suffered a major, life-threatening illness.
What is a Sonnet?
Originally derived from the Sicilian word, sonetto, which means ‘little song’, what we know as the ‘sonnet’ today—a fourteen line poem with a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure—was solidified by the thirteenth century. Donne’s Holy Sonnet, Death Be Not Proud, is a ‘Shakespearean sonnet’, as the particular form it adheres to was first popularised by the English poet and playwright, William Shakespeare. Its structure consists of three quatrains and a couplet, adhering to the metrical technique of iambic pentameter. However, while Donne’s poem generally adheres to the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet, it follows the rhyme scheme (albeit with slight variation) of an Italian sonnet—that is, abba, abba, cddc , ae.
The Poem
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Analysis
The speaker begins by addressing Death as a person—as subject—in a powerful act of personification:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
Throughout this sonnet, the literary technique of apostrophe, which occurs when a writer is addressing a subject who cannot, or will not, respond, is used in order to establish a judge-vs-criminal dynamic between the speaker and Death. Indeed, Death, as he listens to these accusations, is mute. From these opening lines we can grasp that Donne seeks to reassess and deconstruct the role of Death, and we have been invited to watch on from the stands as the verdict is carried out.
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
Donne refers to the accused as ‘poor Death’, intimating the degree to which he feels superior—himself being assured, as a baptised Christian, of his inheritance in God’s kingdom, in that ‘new heaven and new earth…where righteousness dwells’, as the second epistle of St. Peter describes (2 Pt. 3:12-13). Death is here presented as being powerless to do the very thing for which he is universally feared: to kill, to end life and snuff out the light of the soul. Thus ends the first quatrain of Donne’s Holy Sonnet.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
Here, ‘rest and sleep’ are described as ‘pictures’ of Death—brief anticipations of a reality yet to be fully realised. What is this ultimate rest, this most pleasurable of all states? The answer, the speaker is coming to realise, is Death itself. If rest and sleep are but pictures of Death, and those things are pleasant, then from Death can only come more pleasantries. Donne is here attempting to deprive Death of its terrifying connotations, divesting that ancient threat of all dread and terror.
There a similar picture of Death within the work of one of Donne’s contemporaries, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet (1601), written eight years prior to Death be Not Proud, in its most enduring soliloquy represents Death as a kind of sleep:
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