Divine Meditation 10: Death, be not proud: Symbols

Death

Although the speaker directly addresses Death as if it were a person, it’s important to think of Death as a symbolic figure in the poem. This claim may initially seem self-evident. But does the personified figure of Death simply symbolize the biological process of death? Not exactly. Instead, Death functions as a symbol of the speaker’s faith. As long as the speaker can convince themself that Death doesn’t have any real power, then they can maintain their faith in everlasting life. Yet for all the speaker’s apparent confidence in their defiance and refusal of Death, a shadow of a doubt arguably lingers beneath the surface. We can detect traces of such doubt in the first quatrain, where the speaker uses simple negation to deny Death’s power. This initial claim is thus more rhetorical than substantive. Elsewhere, their argument against Death relies on speculation rather than fact. However clever the speaker may be with words, their argument leaves something to be desired. And if there is indeed lingering doubt on the speaker’s part, then Death may be said to symbolize their fearful projection of the nonexistence of an afterlife.

Sleep

In the second stanza, the speaker introduces sleep as a symbolic approximation of Death (lines 5–8):

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

As these lines indicate, the speaker symbolically links Death to sleep as part of their overall project of refuting Death’s power over life. In this case, the speaker refutes the power of Death by suggesting that “rest and sleep” are “pictures” of dying—that is, they are essentially imitations of what dying will be like. And since rest and sleep are both pleasurable activities, the speaker concludes that the experience of dying will be even more enjoyable: “from thee much more [pleasure] must flow.” Furthermore, the speaker posits that because Death must be pleasurable, the “best men” happily go to their deaths, knowing they’ll be able to “rest . . . their bones” and hence earn their “soul’s delivery.” By drawing out this symbolic link, the speaker effectively strips Death of its terror and presents it as something ultimately desirable.

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