Simon Wein
Petach Tikvah, Israel

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die…What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?
—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

In his sonnet “Death Be Not Proud,” John Donne (1572–1631) anthropomorphizes and personalizes death, perhaps in an attempt to diminish its terror. By suggesting that we have agency and choice when it comes to death, the sonnet offers a palliative to the blunt assertions of the epigraph.

What is it about death that terrifies us? We have seen dead people; corpses are cold and pale, but not terrifying. Death is the end of life, and so the terror is fundamentally about the instinct to live. A living being, when faced with a threat, is consumed by fear so that the organism can avoid death. Unlike animals, human fear of death is amplified by self-aware consciousness and symbolic imaginings. It is pain, suffocation, anxiety, regret, love, loss, anticipation, and other thoughts and feelings that terrorize us.

The idea of an afterlife, which Donne leans on, is an unknown, or more accurately, an unknowable. Religions and certain belief systems describe a soul (also an empirical unknown), which continues after biological life has ceased. Some religions postulate a final judgement to redress the glaring absence of theodicy on earth. Many cultures amplify fear about the after-death experience, maybe to maintain social control through terror. Fear of the afterlife can only provoke fear if one believes in it; if there is nothing that continues in the hereafter, then logically one cannot be frightened of that. In any event, we are reminded of Freud’s incisive observation: “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.” (Reflections on War and Death, 1915)

John Donne’s personal life was filled with grief, tragedy, and expensive principled stances. His marriage to Anne More was considered illicit, which created difficult religious and social circumstances. More died at the age of thirty-three during the birth of their twelfth child. Five children died before the age of ten. After the death of one of his children, Donne observed that there would be one less mouth to feed, but also bitterly noted he could not afford a funeral. Donne’s poverty was, in part, self-inflicted for the sake of love and his religion. He was born a Catholic in Anglican England (when Catholicism was banned) and suffered religious bigotry. He converted to Anglicanism and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Cambridge University, eventually becoming the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and a renowned preacher.

Donne knew shame, pride, humiliation, and love. He filtered, kneaded, and fermented life’s bitter and beautiful experiences to create words and ideas that bore no bitterness, only the majesty of mortal man bearing witness to mortality.

Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. Especially death. What makes Donne’s “Sonnet X” exceptional is his extraordinary use of imagery, irony, humor, and wit. After reading this sonnet, we are paradoxically comforted and mollified in the face of death. It bolsters our morale, in part because of the way Donne mocks death, permitting us to glance aside from our common fate without denying it.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

Lying in bed at night, our fears fester and inflame the imagination. In this sonnet, Donne personalizes death and makes it more approachable. In the Middle Ages, death was often represented by the Grim Reaper and his scythe. Death in a human form becomes less abstract and more malleable, perhaps reducing its icy grip on hearts and minds. Donne calls Death’s bluff, declaiming it as nothing to fear.

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Donne composes a wonderful repetitive alliteration between “th” and “d.” He thereby ties together “thou” and “death” in a personal communication and courageous confrontation. The challenge is thrown in death’s face: You, Death, cannot kill me. What does Donne mean by this paradoxical, even absurd, comment?

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.

Donne defangs death by noting that it looks like sleep and rest, both of which provide pleasure. Nobody is spared death; it is the great leveler. Donne then repeats that Death simply provides bodily rest and spiritual peace—wonderful wit and humor.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

Donne continues to belittle and denigrate death, calling it out as being subjugated to mere chance and, ironically, dependent on the hand of man. Death’s companions and compatriots are a pitiful bunch, offering the reader comfort through an amusing humiliation.

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

Opium and magic incantations can induce sleep, akin to or better than death. Donne is poking fun at death with sarcasm, then saying that death has no need to be proud.

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

Donne ties his criticism back to his religious beliefs, which he hinted at in the opening verse, invoking the afterlife as the ultimate truth. The final irony is the death of death itself, since the soul continues forever; once Life has ceased, so Death dies. The soul will continue after death and Death will have been defeated. Donne concludes this witty stream of logic with the staccato-like immortal line, “Death, thou shalt die.” We, the mortal reader, are both calmed and emboldened.

In the seventeenth century, there was no scientific medicine. For Donne, a Doctor of Divinity, religion and words were the primary weapons against death. Yet at the contemporary bedside, the immortality of the soul is infrequently invoked as a balm for the sick. Most prefer the modern science of medicine and its attendant, forever-hoping, until there is too little time left to contemplate what comes next.