Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud"

Summary

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. The poem is an apostrophe, a speech addressed to Death as a person, and from its first words it refuses Death the dignity of a fearful enemy. Some have called Death mighty and dreadful, the speaker says, but it is not; those it thinks it overthrows do not really die, and it cannot kill him either. The octave builds the case by logic. Rest and sleep are only pictures of death, and they give pleasure, so death itself should give much more; the best men go with Death soonest, to find rest for their bones and the delivery of their souls. The sestet turns from argument to insult. Death is a slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men; it keeps low company with poison, war and sickness; and poppy or charms can put people to sleep as well as its stroke can, so it has no cause to swell with pride. The final couplet gives the decisive reason. After one short sleep the dead wake to eternity, and then death itself will be no more: death, thou shalt die. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet in its octave (abbaabba) with a sestet that closes in an English couplet (cddcee), a combination Donne favored. Its confidence rests on the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and its last line echoes Paul's promise in 1 Corinthians 15 that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Donne's original spellings in this text, such as soe, mee and poyson, are kept as Grierson printed them. The sonnet is among the most anthologized religious poems in English and is a favorite of readers facing grief and illness.

Top Lessons

• Arguing with death

  Donne does not merely console; he debates. The sonnet moves through premises (sleep is death's picture, sleep is pleasant, death serves lower masters) to a conclusion, showing that faith can reason and that fear can be met with argument as well as feeling.

• Cutting death down to size

  Lines 9-12 humble Death by naming its masters and its companions. A thing that obeys fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and that poppy can rival, is no sovereign. The sonnet teaches that much of death's terror lies in its reputation, which the poem attacks.

• The resurrection as the ground of courage

  The last two lines give the sonnet's true reason for confidence: after one short sleep we wake eternally. Donne's boldness depends on the Christian hope of the resurrection, not on stoic indifference, and the final paradox makes death the one that dies.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The sonnet's argument rests on the old analogy of sleep as the image of death, and its sestet names the period's soporifics directly: poppy, that is opium, could bring sleep as well as death's stroke. Opium was a standard remedy for pain and sleeplessness in early modern English medicine, and the line records a lay awareness that the same drug could induce oblivion. Poison, war and sickness are listed as death's ordinary agents. Donne's own later illness of 1623, recorded hour by hour in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, shows the same mind meeting physicians and fever at close range.

• Lines 5-6

  Rest and sleep are called death's pictures, the classical analogy of sleep and death on which the argument turns.

• Lines 9-12

  Death keeps company with poison, war and sickness, and poppy or charms are said to bring sleep as well as death's blow.