John Donne And The Psychology Of Death
The seventeenth-century poet John Donne has gone down in the history of popular culture for three lines: “No man is an island,” “Ask not for whom the bell tolls -- it tolls for thee”, and the opening of a poem called “Death be not proud”. This last came from a collection of Donne’s poems which came to be called the “Holy Sonnets.” The name is possibly misleading, for it leads people to suppose that he wrote them after he became an ordained preacher. However, he actually wrote these several years before, when he was going through a severe and almost incapacitating depression. During this time Donne seems to have been thinking a great deal about his own mortality, as well as the ...
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of Elizabeth Drury, the daughter of his friend and patron. . . . Generally regarded as the foremost of the metaphysical poets, Donne was always an uneven writer. His secular poems were original, energetic, and highly rhetorical, full of passionate thought and intellectual juggling. . . . His adroitness in argument and his skill at impersonating different states of mind make Donne’s poetry intense and often riddling (Ousby, 266).
Holy Sonnet #10 is certainly Donne’s most famous poem, and possibly one of the most famous in English literature. “Death be not proud,” it begins: “though some have called thee/ mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so” (Donne, 89). Here Donne is saying that Death, who thinks he is so tremendously powerful, is not, so he might as well stop preening himself. This is certainly a surprising opening to the poem, because we do think of Death as all-powerful, and in the end the one thing we life-loving beings most fear.
He goes on: For those whom thou think’st ...
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that there are many other things that we can do in order to "sleep." (Garza, Online Source) -- in Donne’s words, “poppy or charms can make us sleep as well/ and better than thy stroke” (Donne, 89)
A proper English sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet, intended to wrap the entire sonnet up nicely and provide the punchline (Main and Seng, 247). And this sonnet is no exception. “One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ and Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die” is a wonderful ending. Here Donne points out that according to the tenets of his Christian faith, his “death” is not permanent extermination at all, but simply a sleep like the ones he has every night; he fully and confidently ...
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John Donne And The Psychology Of Death. (2008, May 10). Retrieved November 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/John-Donne-And-The-Psychology-Death/83427
"John Donne And The Psychology Of Death." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 10 May. 2008. Web. 23 Nov. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/John-Donne-And-The-Psychology-Death/83427>
"John Donne And The Psychology Of Death." Essayworld.com. May 10, 2008. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/John-Donne-And-The-Psychology-Death/83427.
"John Donne And The Psychology Of Death." Essayworld.com. May 10, 2008. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/John-Donne-And-The-Psychology-Death/83427.
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