Since posting yesterday, I have been thinking about what to write about this Donne sonnet. The meaning is relatively straightforward: don’t fear death, since it is only the passageway to eternal life.

The poem is more about the narrator, who directly addresses Death. I could not even call this a dialogue. More like a dramatic monologue. I guess in another post, I could imagine Death’s replies and comments to the narrator, but not today.

The narrator speaks to Death as though Death were standing right in front of him. The first line contains an imperative: “be not proud.” We would not say this in Modern English. If we were phrasing a command to someone, we would say, “Don’t do that!” or “Don’t be proud!” Donne has left out the “do” in an ellipsis. Instead of the emphasis on Death not behaving pridefully or feeling pride, the emphasis seems more like one of state of being. It is as though Donne were saying “Cease to exist being proud.” For me, as a person steeped in Hamlet, this half-line reminds me of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Act 3. To over simplify this soliloquy grossly, Hamlet questions where he should continue with life or commit suicide. But Hamlet also thinks about how he fears not death but what comes after death: “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns” (if I got this wrong, I am working from memory). Now that is quite different from Donne’s narrator who fears not the afterlife, but dying.

Or does the narrator really fear the afterlife? Or does he fear the process of dying? At one point in the sonnet, he says that death gives men “Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery” (l. 8). This seems positive: rest from toil and saving from temptation. The narrator expresses no doubt that he won’t wake up in the afterlife: “we wake eternally.” Wisely he refrains from saying he will be in heaven (or hell); he can’t know which since only God makes that final determination on the Day of Judgement. That way Donne’s narrator cannot be accused of arrogance, because he believes he is one of the saved. In all, the sonnet seems relatively neutral or indistinct about the afterlife.

The narrator is  not neutral about death whom he calls a “slave” which “does with poison, war, and sickness dwell” (line 9). In Elizabethan England, about 90% of the population died before age 60 and about 30% of all children died before age 6. Most of the people died of disease, which is the last of three causes of death Donne’s lists. Why does he list poison and war before sickness? It would not ruin the rhyme scheme to rearrange the words. What war did Donne live through? He lived through the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) and the Nine Years’ War (Irish: 1594-1603), but these don’t seem to have involved massive casualties. Poison? If you define “with poison” as deliberately poisoned by another person with intent to kill, that would not be a very large number. But if you define “with poison” as dying from a noxious substance, then lots of people could die of poison: bad water, botulism, chemicals, etc.

At the beginning of the poem, the narrator seems to defy Death: “nor yet canst thou kill me.” He addresses Death as at best an equal and at worst an inferior. Early Modern English still had two forms of the second person pronoun. The form “you” could be used to address more than one person or to address a single person formally. The form “thou” could only be used to address a single person and was often used informally or intimately. For me the distinction between “you” and “thou” is paralleled by modern German “Sie” and “du.” In modern English paraphrase, Donne declares, “yet you cannot kill me.” Only in this line does Donne use the first person singular. No where else. It makes the line personal: death cannot harm the narrator. The narrator is insulated from Death’s power and terror. Why? Because the narrator does not see Death as an end but as a passage way to eternity. The poem also ends the first quatrain with the object pronoun “me,” which rhymes with the first line “thee,” referring to Death. The quatrain is framed by two foes: Death at the beginning and the narrator at the end. By the rhyme scheme of abba, the narrator also vanquishes Death.

After this line, all other first person pronouns are plural: “our” in line 7; “us” in line 11; “we” in line 13. Donne leaves behind the concern of the individual for his own survival and puts the narrator in the larger group of all humanity. We all must face death and this poem is our comfort that we will live spiritually after our bodies’ die. Donne’s move from the particular to the general reminds me of his sermon “No man is an island,” where he admonishes his audience that every time the bell tolls for an dead person, it is ringing for us: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind” (Meditation 17). So of course, Donne would say that we all surmount Death and wake together in the afterlife.

In the last heroic couplet, the narrator predicts instead Death’s death:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

He argues that since all living things will wake eternally after “one short sleep,” that death will no longer exist.  The last line has “death” uncapitalized and “Death” capitalized. The first “death” is just the action of dying. The second “Death” is the being whom the narrator has been defying. He says, “Death, thou shalt die” (line 14). This is a paradox. How can death die or cease to be or cease to ever happen again? It is also a rhetorical example of traductio (declining the same word into its various forms such as noun to verb, etc). The narrator kills Death with a rhetorical device. Now that is an interesting move.