‘Death, be not proud’

‘Death, be not proud’

By: John Donne

A brief summary and analysis of one of John Donne’s classic Holy Sonnets

The sonnet ‘Death, be not proud’ is one of the most famous ‘holy sonnets’ written by John Donne (1572-1631). What follows is the poem, followed by a short introduction to it, including an analysis of its more interesting imagery and language.

Death is personified as a male braggart, like a soldier boasting of all the men he’s slain. There is also a suggestion of a male lover bragging about all of his conquests between the sheets: Donne liked the double meaning of ‘die’ as both ‘expire’ and ‘orgasm’, and the idea that ‘those, whom thou thinks, thou dost overthrow, / Die not’ hides the suggestion that ‘you may think all those women you conquer are overcome with pleasure, but they’re faking it’. (This faint suggestion of an erotic subtext is also borne out by the line, ‘Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow’.)

‘Stroake’, too, is ambiguous: it ostensibly refers to the stroke of an axe or a sword that ends somebody’s life, but it is also alive to the other, more tender, meaning of stroking somebody in a caress, such as in lovemaking. ‘Why swell’s thou then?’ Well, quite – tumescence is uncalled for, since you’re not ‘all that’ as a lover, Death. Note the monosyllables of the last line, which hammer out in ten short words the matter-of-fact declaration that the speaker will beat death through being born again in heaven.

‘Death, be not proud’ is rightly viewed as one of Donne’s finest poems, and certainly one of his greatest sonnets. Like the best of Donne’s poetry it fuses religious and erotic imagery and ideas, bringing the physical and the metaphysical together.