Summary
The speaker tells Death that it should not feel proud,
for though some have called it “mighty and dreadful,” it is not.
Those whom Death thinks it kills do not truly die, nor, the speaker
says, “can’st thou kill me.” Rest and sleep are like little copies
of Death, and they are pleasurable; thus, the speaker reasons, Death
itself must be even more so—indeed, it is the best men who go soonest
to Death, to rest their bones and enjoy the delivery of their souls.
Death, the speaker claims, is a slave to “fate, chance, kings, and
desperate men,” and is forced to dwell with war, poison, and sickness.
The speaker says that poppies and magic charms can make men sleep
as well as, or better than, Death’s stroke, so why should Death
swell with pride? Death is merely a short sleep, after which the
dead awake into eternal life, where Death shall no longer exist:
Death itself will die.
Form
This simple sonnet follows an ABBAABBACDCDEE rhyme scheme
and is written in a loose iambic pentameter. In its structural division
of its subject, it is a Petrarchan sonnet rather than a Shakespearean
one, with an octet establishing the poem’s tension, and the subsequent
sestet resolving it.
Commentary
This rather uncomplicated poem is probably Donne’s most
famous and most anthologized; “Death be not proud” seems to be,
for some reason, the most famous phrase in Donne. The sonnet takes
the oblique reasoning and topsy-turvy symbolism of Donne’s metaphysical
love poems and applies them to a religious theme, treating the personified
figure of Death as someone not worthy of awe or terror but of contempt.
Donne charts a line of reasoning that explores a different idea
in each quatrain. First, Death is not powerful or mighty because
he does not kill those he thinks he kills; second, the experience
of being dead must be more pleasurable than rest and sleep, which
are pleasurable, pale copies of death, and the best people die most readily
to hurry to their “soul’s delivery” (“delivery,” a childbearing
pun, introduces the idea that the death of the body is a birth for
the soul).
In the third quatrain, the speaker mocks Death’s position:
It is inferior to drugs and potions, a slave to fate, chance, kings,
and desperate men (each of which deals out death), and lives in
the gutter with poison and sickness. In the couplet, the speaker
rounds out the idea of the poem, by saying that, if the afterlife
is eternal, then upon the moment a person dies, it is really Death
that dies to that person and not vice-versa, for that person will
never again be subject to Death. This final idea represents the
classic metaphysical moment, in which an established idea is turned
completely on its head by a seemingly innocuous line of reasoning—the
idea that Death could die is startling and counterintuitive but
completely sensible in light of Donne’s reasoning. Of course, even
in the seventeenth century the idea would not have seemed as startling
as many of Donne’s other metaphysical conceits—it is an idea that
appears not only in Shakespeare (“And death once dead, there’s no more
dying then”) but also in the Bible itself (“The last enemy that
shall be destroyed is death,” from I Corinthians).
