John Donne (1572-1631), born into a Catholic family in London, wrote witty love poems and satires as a young man, lost his prospects by a secret marriage to Anne More in 1601, and after years of poverty and illness was ordained in the Church of England in 1615. As Dean of St Paul's from 1621 he became the most celebrated preacher of his day. His Holy Sonnets and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) make him the central English poet of the Christian encounter with death.
written c. 1609-1610; published 1633 · Renaissance Early Modern · Poetry
Death, be not proud is one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, a group of religious sonnets probably written around 1609-1610, circulated in manuscript among friends and printed only after his death in the Poems of 1633. In Herbert Grierson's 1912 edition, followed here, it is Holy Sonnet X; the numbering differs among manuscripts and early printings.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
