Divine Meditation 10: Death, be not proud: Themes

Death Is Not Final

The most important theme in Donne’s poem relates to the speaker’s implicit claim that death is not final. This claim may not initially seem obvious, given that the speaker spends the entire poem addressing a personification of Death and insisting that this figure has no real power. The speaker’s main preoccupation thus seems aimed at cutting this human-like projection of Death down to size. But if we look beyond the speaker’s insistent refusal of Death, what we find isn’t mere defiance. Indeed, the speaker is making a deeper claim. If Death isn’t as “mighty and dreadful” (line 2) as most people think, it’s because dying doesn’t mark an absolute end to life. The speaker insists that we experience dying as “one short sleep,” after which “we wake eternally” (line 13). In other words, the speaker’s refusal of Death is ultimately an expression of their faith in an everlasting life that survives on the other side of dying. Though the speaker doesn’t offer any explicit vision of an afterlife, Donne’s religious affiliation encourages us to read their faith in eternal wakefulness as fundamentally Christian.

The Power of the Human Mind

Even as the speaker refutes Death’s power over life, they implicitly assert the power of the human mind. They do so primarily through the poem’s overarching argumentative structure. Indeed, the speaker doesn’t simply trash-talk Death; they pursue a sustained line of reasoning, which they support with various rhetorical tactics as well as different kinds of evidence. In the first quatrain, the speaker uses negation to great effect, arguing that Death is not powerful or mighty because it doesn’t actually kill those it thinks it kills. In the second quatrain, the speaker takes a more speculative turn, positing that dying must be as pleasurable as falling asleep. Then, in the third quatrain, the speaker claims that Death’s a mere “slave” (line 9) to other forces that deal out death. And importantly, Death isn’t just a slave to abstract entities like “fate” and “chance,” but also specifically to humans, including powerful figures like “kings,” but also even to lowly, “desperate men” (line 9). Having passed through these distinct parts of their argument, the speaker boldly concludes: “Death, thou shalt die” (line 14). The rhetorical force of this conclusion, as well as the cleverness of the speaker’s overall logic, implicitly showcases the power of the human mind.

The Lingering Nature of Doubt

Despite the speaker’s defiant refusal of Death, the reader may sense traces of doubt that linger beneath the poem’s surface. Detecting these traces requires us to read the speaker’s apparent confidence against the grain. For instance, consider the poem’s opening quatrain (line 1–4):

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

The speaker’s argument in these lines relies primarily on a rhetorical tactic of negation. Though Death may take pride in being “mighty and dreadful,” the speaker insists that it shouldn’t be proud because it isn’t mighty or dreadful. Likewise, even though Death thinks it brings an absolute end to the lives of those whom it kills, it’s wrong, because these people don’t die, and so Death also can’t kill the speaker. It’s important to note that this argument doesn’t rest on facts. Instead, it rests on a repeated gesture of negation that, though rhetorically effective, isn’t logically bulletproof. With this in mind, the speaker’s repeated negations come to seem a little too insistent—that is, they appear to express the speaker’s wish rather than an absolute truth. The other evidence presented by the speaker proves similarly clever but ultimately wishful and speculative, which leaves space for doubting the speaker’s confidence in their own claims.