Death Be Not Proud

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1633

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Metaphysical poetry is the name given to a group of mostly 17th-century English poets. Donne is considered the most important of the Metaphysicals, who include such poets as George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw. The Metaphysical poets are noted for their clever, intellectual poetry that involves unusual, complex metaphors known as “conceits,” and other witty word play such as paradox and puns. The conceits challenge the reader to follow the argument and see the similarity between two very different things that no one before the Metaphysical poets would have thought of comparing. The speaker in Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” for example, declares that his soul and that of the woman he loves can never be parted, and in an elaborate conceit he compares the souls of lovers to the two feet of a draughtman’s compass; each can move only in coordination with the other.

Donne and many of the other Metaphysical poets were popular in their day but their poetry went out of fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Samuel Johnson, famous literary critic and essayist, declared in The Lives of the Poets (1779) that in the Metaphysical poets,

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased (Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Poets. 1779).

Critical opinion changed in the 20th century, stimulated by poet and critic T. S. Eliot in an essay that was published in 1921. Rediscovered with enthusiasm, Donne’s poetry exerted an influence on Modernism, and his position as one of England’s finest poets was restored—a reputation that has continued into the 21st century.

Authorial Context

Many of Donne’s most famous poems are about love, but he also wrote dozens of religious poems, both before and after becoming an Anglican priest. In the 19 Divine Meditations, of which “Death, Be Not Proud” is one, Donne’s first-person speaker examines sin, death, and salvation. Many of these poems are tormented and full of doubt, and Donne’s speaker pleads with God for forgiveness of his sins. Such poems are in marked contrast to the calm confidence displayed in “Death, Be Not Proud.” As they explore some of the central tenets of the Christian faith, these poems also display Donne’s typical wit and ingenuity.

In the first of the Divine Meditations, which begins “Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?” the mood is very different from “Death, Be Not Proud.” In this poem, death has a power that is not so easily broken, given the sinfulness of the speaker, who is acutely conscious of what is about to happen: “I run to death, and death meets me as fast / And all my pleasures are like yesterday” (Lines 3-4). He is terrified by the prospect of death and feels that his sins will weigh him down toward hell. Only God’s grace can save him from the temptations of the devil.

The devil also raises his head in the second Divine Meditation, “As due by many titles I resign / Myself to you,” in which Donne’s speaker wrestles with a paradox: He is made in the image of God, but nonetheless, the devil takes control of him. How can this be? he twice asks, yet he has no answer. His only hope is that God himself will rise up and fight on his behalf (a clever reversal of the more common notion of a person fighting for God). Otherwise, he will continue in despair, perplexed by his fear that God, in spite of the fact that he loves humankind, will not choose him. The poem ends with a typical Donne paradox: “And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.”

A similar uncertainty is apparent in the sixth Divine Meditation, which begins, “This is my play’s last scene.” The speaker is nearing death, which will “instantly unjoint / My body and soul, and I shall sleep a space” (Lines 5-6)—a sleep image that also occurs in “Death, Be Not Proud,” but unlike in that poem, the speaker is assailed by fear as he contemplates the fact that his “ever-waking part shall see that face, / Whose fear already shakes my every joint” (Lines 7-8). Again, as is common in many of the Divine Meditations, in the sestet the speaker hopes that he may be purged of his sins.

In “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners,” the seventh Divine Meditation, the speaker boldly issues a command for the general resurrection to come now, in which, in terms that echo “Death, Be Not Proud,” “All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, / Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes / Shall behold God and never taste death’s woe” (Lines 6-8). In the sestet, however, in a witty but heartfelt reversal, Donne’s speaker cancels the instruction, in effect saying that this is not the right time for the resurrection. The dead should go on sleeping for a while longer. The reason? The speaker feels that his sins outweigh his virtues, and if the last trumpets sound and the resurrection is at hand, it would be too late for him to ask for God’s grace. Instead, he asks for God’s help in teaching him “how to repent” (Line 13).

In the midst of all these anguished musings on death and desperate hopes that God in his mercy will wash all sins away, “Death, Be Not Proud” stands out among the Divine Meditations for its bold and serene certainties about the conquest of death and assurance of eternal life.