For those we have lost. Not for the lost.

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.
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.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

-John Donne

Donne tells Death to not be proud. Some people have called Death powerful, but Donne claims Death is not. Death may believe he has defeated those who die, but Donne states those people do not truly die because their souls live on in the afterlife. According to Donne and the poem, people who die are only dead momentarily, then they live along with all other spirits in Heaven. This is why Donne claims Death cannot kill him.

Donne presents an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from world-weariness for its alleged “victims.” The poet criticizes Death as a slave to other forces: fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. Death is not in control, for a variety of other powers exercise their volition in taking lives. Even in the rest it brings, Death is inferior to drugs. Finally, the speaker predicts the end of Death itself, stating “Death, thou shalt die.”

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).

Resources:
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