Death Be Not Proud

As a poet, Donne enjoyed taking up an unusual position; he liked to examine his chosen topic in a way that no one had done before and state his views with a self-confident swagger that involved much intellectual word play. He also liked to begin a poem with a startling first line that grabbed the reader’s attention. While “Death, Be Not Proud” is not the most extreme example of the latter, Donne’s speaker makes it very clear that he considers himself to be someone with the authority to speak directly to the personified (and capitalized) figure of Death, whom he addresses throughout as “thou” and “thee.” (The direct address to a personified thing is known as an apostrophe.) The speaker is going to rebuke death and put it in its place. He will not be intimidated by death.

In the first two lines, the speaker offers some blunt instruction to his chosen adversary; death should not allow itself to be flattered by the fact that some people regard it as “mighty and dreadful” (Line 2), for such views do not express the truth. Death is neither of these things, as the speaker’s five monosyllables spell out forcefully: “for thou are not so” (Line 2). Lines 3 and 4 elaborate on this thought. Death is in fact deceived by its own conceit; it thinks it has killed people, but on the contrary, they are not really dead. Something else is at work in the situation, the speaker implies, that death knows nothing about (and to which the speaker will allude by the end of the sonnet). In Lines 3 and 4, the speaker states that death does not have the victims it claims; it is thus “poor” (Line 4), not rich with a harvest of human lives. The word “poor” also carries the meaning of death being an object of pity, but this is meant sarcastically. The speaker’s only purpose is to mock this non-dreadful entity known as death. In the second part of Line 4, the speaker makes things personal: Death cannot kill him either. He spells it out, again in monosyllables—six this time—in plain, unmistakable terms: “nor yet canst thou kill me” (Line 4).

Having set up the initial argument, Donne elaborates on it in the second quatrain. He has more arrows in his quiver that he will use to undermine death and its illusory claims. He wants to thoroughly defang and debunk the much-vaunted tormentor and conqueror of men and women. With this in mind, in Line 5 he embarks on an ingenious simile, comparing two things that humans enjoy—rest and sleep—with death. If humans enjoy the former, which are only “pictures” (Line 5) of death (that is, they may look similar to death), then the experience of death proper can only bring even more pleasure. It is an outlandish simile, but the speaker has the advantage over death and wants to exploit it fully. In Lines 7 and 8, he continues to counter death’s image of itself as “mighty and dreadful” (Line 2). Line 7 offers the view not only that the best men die young but perhaps also, as suggested by the word “soonest,” they go to death willingly and without protest. This is likely because they know what the speaker also knows, that despite appearances, they “die not” (Line 4). (The speaker will make this Christian perspective more explicit by the end of the poem.) Death is further emasculated in Line 8, which explains that the dead are able to physically rest. (Some manuscripts of the poem have the word “bodies” rather than “bones.”) Moreover, the souls of the dead experience “delivery,” that is, freedom, since they are no longer bound to a mortal body.

In the third quatrain, death takes another battering at the hands of this determined and verbally and intellectually dexterous poet. Far from being a dreaded, powerful destroyer of men, death, according to the speaker, is helpless, a mere “slave” (Line 9) to the ebb and flow of worldly events. The word “slave” is particularly well chosen, since a slave has neither power nor status and is completely controlled by others. It is yet another outlandish comparison by the poet. Death must scurry hither and thither according to both predestined fate and the unpredictable end of countless individuals. Death is a slave to kings at the top of the social scale and desperados at the bottom of it, since kings have the power to impose death on others and desperate men may commit murder, thus in each case summoning death to serve their own ends. There does not seem much left for death to be in control of; it just goes where it is called, like any servant or slave. It also keeps undesirable company: “And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell” (Line 10).

The speaker continues his takedown of death in Lines 11 and 12. What death prides itself on can be accomplished more effectively by other things. The juice of the opium poppy is a narcotic that can also induce sleep, and there are other “charms” that can accomplish the same thing. Perhaps the poet is referring here to herbs, gemstones, or crystals or some magical formula. Whatever he has in mind, the point is that such things can induce sleep more satisfactorily than death. The sense here, as reflected in several variant manuscripts of the poem that have the word “easier” rather than “better,” is that poppies and charms accomplish the goal of sleep without the pain and suffering associated with death. Once more, the poet has made a clever and daring comparison, and as a result of all the arguments he has assembled he feels ready for the first time to address a direct question to the deflated figure of death: “why swell’st thou then?” (Line 12). The question is a rhetorical one; the speaker is simply pointing out to death that it has nothing to boast about; for death to fill itself with pride would be just a vain show, devoid of substance.

The speaker continues to elaborate on this in the concluding couplet, which draws on the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, with a particular debt to Paul the Apostle’s First Letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament. For the Christian believer, death must be considered just a “short sleep” (Line 13), because eternal life awaits the faithful dead when Christ returns. As Paul puts it in his letter, apostrophizing death in the same way that Donne was later to do: “When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’  ’O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’” (I Corinthians 15: 54-55, New Standard Version). This allusion sets up the final triumphant paradox of the poem: “And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die” (Line 14).