The speaker of Donne’s poem is an anonymous figure who directly addresses a personified version of Death. We don’t know anything concrete about the speaker, such as their age, gender, class, or racial identity. All we know is that they’re thinking about Death, and that they’re in a rather defiant mood. The speaker’s defiance shines clearly throughout the poem, every line of which features either a direct negation of Death’s power or else some other kind of deflationary gesture or comparison. The relentlessness of their defiance inspires us to ask: Why is the speaker so preoccupied with Death? In truth, we can only speculate. It could be the case, for instance, that the speaker has recently lost a friend, family member, or lover. Or maybe a loved one is currently lying on their death bed. Perhaps the speaker themself is ill, as Donne almost certainly was when he wrote the poem. Any of these reasons might explain the speaker’s preoccupation, as well as the defiant attitude they present as they face their own grief or mortality.

Alternatively, the speaker could be contemplating Death in a more abstract sense, which would explain their philosophical cast of mind. Indeed, the speaker appears to have received training in formal logic, which they demonstrate in the way they structure their address. This structure features a sustained argument aimed at refuting belief in the power of Death. The speaker builds this argument carefully across the poem’s three quatrains, each of which presents new evidence and advances their case. This argument builds until the final couplet, where the speaker makes their clever—and shocking—conclusion that “Death . . . shalt die” (line 14). The speaker’s intellectual prowess has led many critics to draw a connection with Donne himself. Donne worked as a lawyer early in his career before eventually becoming a priest, and so he is precisely the type of person who would apply legal argumentation to more abstract, metaphysical matters. But regardless of whether we equate them with Donne, the speaker approaches their rejection of Death with a resoluteness that some readers might question. Indeed, we might ask: Does the speaker’s insistent refusal of Death conceal a deeper sense of doubt?

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