18 pages • 36 minutes read
John DonneDeath Be Not Proud
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1633A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Illusory Power of Death
In Christian medieval Europe, death was often personified as the Grim Reaper, a skeletal, robed figure with a scythe who harvested human souls. Donne’s figure of death is quite different. There is nothing grim about this death. Instead, he is full of pride in his destructive power, at least according to the poem’s speaker. In traditional Christian thought, pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but in this poem Donne comes up with a clever twist: It is death, rather than a person, who is guilty of committing this sin. Then comes another twist: Ironically, death has nothing to be proud of, says the speaker, since death’s power is all appearance rather than substance; it is, in truth, illusory. Death is therefore presented as a prideful, deluded sinner.
It is this understanding of death, infused by Christian beliefs, that enables Donne’s speaker to stand up to death. He does not cower in a corner, afraid, waiting for the Grim Reaper to come and get him. On the contrary, he takes the offensive, and he is in earnest, knowing that he has scripture on his side. Death is not extinction. It is not a final state but a temporary condition. It is not what it seems. Given the speaker’s knowledge and perspective, death does not stalk his victims and strike them down when it pleases death. In this poem, death is actually a silent, motionless figure; death does nothing and says nothing—other than displaying pride—and is outmaneuvered by the skillful word play of the poet, who launches a withering assault on what St. Paul called, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, the “last enemy.” Paul wrote: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (I Corinthians 15: 26), and Donne’s speaker is happy to marshal his intellectual and linguistic abilities and present a novel argument that undermines the status of death. Death is not master but slave. Death can change appearances, but it cannot change the facts of resurrection and eternal life.
The Triumph of the Resurrection
Central to the poem’s assault on the personified figure of death and its seeming power over people is the notion of resurrection and eternal life. This is first mentioned briefly in Line 8, that death brings about the “soul’s delivery,” and it reaches final, triumphant expression in the closing couplet. It is as if the speaker is holding back, taunting death in various ways but waiting before he affirms the crowning truth. He is like a boxer who toys with his opponent, knowing he can defeat him whenever he pleases but wanting to build up the expectations of the crowd, which will make the final knockout all the more exciting and decisive. Donne’s Christian speaker knows very well that the Son of God overcame death, and although Donne always brings his pugnacious, looking-at-things-differently energy to his work, he is in this poem strongly rooted in mainstream Christian thought and scripture. The resurrection of the body after the return of Christ is a fundamental Christian belief.
Donne would have been intimately familiar with the writings of St. Paul, who constructs a careful argument about resurrection in his First Letter to the Corinthians, which lies behind Donne’s poem. In Chapter 15, Paul reassures the doubters in the nascent Christian community in Corinth that the resurrection really happened. All Christian hope rests on that fundamental fact. In verse 15, Paul uses the same sleep metaphor as Donne: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep,” and he repeats it later in the same chapter: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed” (verse 51) by the resurrection of the body. The resurrected body will not be a physical body but an imperishable spiritual body. This sets the stage for Paul’s ringing declaration, which has echoed down the many centuries of Christian belief and entered Donne’s poem: “‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ’O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’” (verses 54-55). The conquest of death, which is stated so directly in the first part of Donne’s final line—“And death shall be no more” (Line 14)—is the essence of St. Paul’s message, and it also occurs in another biblical context. At the beginning of Chapter 21 of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, a “new heaven and a new earth” and the holy city of Jerusalem descend from heaven. In this transformed reality, God will dwell with men and comfort them “and death shall be no more” (verse 4)—Donne’s exact words.
Absolute Faith and Belief
Although neither faith nor belief is mentioned specifically, they act as an underlying theme. The whole edifice of the poem—the weakness of death and its ultimate defeat by the resurrection to eternal life—is based on faith, since no one has actually seen such a thing for themselves, not even Donne’s oh-so-confident speaker. He has likely seen people asleep, whether naturally or induced by narcotics, and he may well have seen dead bodies as a result of “fate, chance, kings, and desperate men” as well as through “poison, war, and sickness” (Lines 9-10). People in the 16th and early 17th century were not as shielded from the sight of death as most modern people are. No one, however, either then or now, has seen the spiritual, resurrected body as described by St. Paul, or has much idea of what it might be like to inhabit one. No one who might have awakened from a “short sleep” (Line 13)—that is, death—and found himself or herself existing in a transcendental state, beyond death, in eternal life, has returned to Earth to tell the tale (notwithstanding those who claim to have experienced life after death while medically deceased). Therefore, such things cannot be known in the way that the fact of death can be known, but they can be believed in, and there is no doubt about the speaker’s faith. It permeates his being. He is utterly certain of it, so certain that he can taunt and defeat the “last enemy” (I Corinthians 15: 26), death. He knows because he has heard the word of God, and as St. Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the preaching of Christ (10: 17). This is enough for the poem’s speaker. Although he may not have seen all that he believes in, he has heard it from an unimpeachable source, and that is enough for him. Faith is synonymous with truth.
Related Titles
By John Donne
