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In terms of its structure, Donne’s poem more closely resembles an English sonnet than an Italian sonnet. A traditional English sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet, and it typically involves a rhetorical “turning” (also known as a volta) before the final couplet. By contrast, a traditional Italian sonnet features just two main sections: the eight-line octave and the six-line sestet, with the volta coming in the transition between them. The first eight lines of Donne’s poem do admittedly resemble an octave, right down to their rhyme scheme: ABBAABBA. However, when we turn to the poem’s final six lines, they don’t quite resemble a sestet. Instead of being integrated through their rhymes as they would be in an Italian sonnet (e.g., CDECDE), they are clearly segmented into a quatrain and a couplet: CDDC EE. With this in mind, what initially appeared as a unified octave in the first eight lines is better understood as a pair of quatrains that happen to share the same rhymes.

This technical discussion of the poem’s rhyme scheme has important implications for how we understand the structure of the speaker’s argument. The speaker pursues a sustained line of reasoning throughout the poem, claiming that Death has less power over life than typically believed. Each of the poem’s three quatrains takes up a slightly different aspect of this claim. In the first quatrain, the speaker argues that Death is not powerful or mighty because it does not kill those it thinks it kills. In the second quatrain, the speaker posits that, because sleep is a pleasurable approximation of Death, then the actual experience of being dead must be wonderful. Finally, in the third quatrain, the speaker mocks Death by claiming that it has no agency, since it’s a slave to various forces and individuals possessing a capacity to kill. After articulating each of these distinct ideas, the speaker moves into the couplet, where they make a surprising conclusion. Given the evidence they have thus far advanced, the speaker now deals a final deathblow to Death itself (lines 13–14):

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

By delaying this surprising conclusion until the final couplet, Donne lends his poem a rhetorical force that distinctly characterizes the English sonnet.

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