Blog #10

John Donne, “Death, be not proud” 

When I read this title for the first time I thought that it meant that the speaker in this poem is speaking directly to death as if it were a person and at some point in the poem, the speaker will mock death.

To paraphrase the poem, it is basically saying:

Hey Death, don't be so prideful, even though you are known to be powerful and dreadful, you're not because of all the life you took away from people

will never really be gone, but you can't kill me either

What you really are is a long lost rest

death itself is amusing and it will always be

you can take the lives of people we care for

but that's only if you provide them with a good rest and trip to somewhere else

men, kings, chance and fate will always overpower you

your friends are no good, they are just desperate

other things can put men at rest way better than death can

but after death, which is a short rest, comes eternal life

there will be no more death, and it will die.

The theme of this poem is that simply no one should fear death because death is weak and it dies in the afterlife. When you go back to the title of this poem, you see that it is titled "Death, be not proud". When I go back and reflect on the poem, I realize how the speaker is really talking to death as if it was a person, basically saying to death that it should not be proud of what it is doing to people making people die. The speaker is also telling death that it should not be proud because killing people is pointless because there will be an afterlife anyway.