Poetry Analysis: ‘Death Be Not Proud’ by John Donne

Death Be Not Proud
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.
—John Donne (1572-1631)

John Donne shifted dramatically in his life: The early Donne was the passionate lover and rebel of sense; the later Donne, a man consumed with his own spiritual journey and search for truth.

Donne is known as the first and greatest of metaphysical poets—those of a genre in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions,” as essayist and critic Samuel Johnson put it.
 
Here, Donne has taken a Romantic form and transformed a transcendental struggle of life and death into a quiet ending, one in which death “shall be no more.”
 
Where Johnson spied cumbersome force, Donne’s style dazzles with soft and calm brilliance, even in the cascade of calumnies against the great “equalizer” Death. “Fate, chance, kings and desperate men” are yoked together, not in bondage but in freedom, in their power to inflict and manipulate death at will. The panorama of life and legacy has overcome death time and again, yet Donne expounds the expansive exploitation of death in one verse.
 
It is the will of man that triumphs over the cessation of life, the will to believe in what cannot be seen, to dismiss “poor death” as mere “pictures” compared to the substance of life infused with the Spirit.
 
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

No bragging rights for Death, according to the poet, who in the first two lines of his sonnet denounces in apostrophe the end of life, “not proud,” “not so.”

“Mighty and dreadful,” two weighty terms, do not belong nor confer any majesty on death. “Thou are not so.” A simple statement, a certain indictment, and the poet has dispensed with Death, who is ponderous, no preposterous for the previous fears His presence has impressed on mankind.

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow?
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

In this neat conceit, Death himself is fooled, limited by the surface. “Thou think’st thou dost overthrow,” the monarch of destruction is an impoverished exile, removed forever more from the room of imperious prominence. “Poor death” is now the object of pity, the last enemy that will be thrown into the lake of fire.

Read more at The Epoch Times