The Holy Sonnet 'Death be not Proud' (Complete Poetry 283-4) seems to show Donne's mind grappling anew with the reality of death in the wake of his wife's demise. The form of the poem gives an impression of thinking aloud, as if the reader overhears the poet's thoughts as he engages directly with death in an attempt both to cut it down to size and to understand its true nature - by such understanding, Donne's words strongly imply, fear of death will be banished, for death will be seen in its true colors as a place of passage from one, unsatisfactory, existence, to another, equally real but more complete and joyful. The opening lines reflect the fact that Donne himself has been among those who have been in awe of death: 'Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful...'. Donne immediately argues against that perception, stating flatly that 'thou art not soe' and asserting the reality of life after death, rendering death itself powerless: 'For those whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, / Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.' Donne goes on to integrate death into the divine pattern of existence, reflecting that it, too, is part of God's creation and has a purpose, even to be considered desirable and pleasant: 'From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures bee, / Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow'. Just as rest and sleep restore the body, so the sleep of death has its purpose in restoring the soul and preparing it for new life. But the poem seems to find its center of gravity in the assurance that death is, ultimately, powerless; the theme to which Donne returns with his observation that death is dependent upon external agents to have any effect, 'Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,' and is rivalled by sleeping draughts and charms for effectiveness: 'why swell'st thou then?' Donne ends with a firm declaration that it is the lot of the human soul to 'wake eternally' after the short sleep of death, 'And death shall bee no more; death, thou shalt die.' The sonnet is not so much an attack upon death or a lament as a reckoning of death's power in the light of Christian assurances of resurrection and the afterlife. In the aftermath of his wife's death it seems Donne needed to seek, and to articulate, such reassurance as much for himself as for others: 'nor yet canst thou kill mee.'
Donne himself declares in another of his Holy Sonnets, Sonnet XVII (Complete Poetry 286-7), that it is his wife's death that has set him to thinking about matters of the spirit more, and with greater intensity, than was the case before:
Since she whom I lov'd hath payd her last debt
To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,
And her Soule early into Heaven ravished,
Wholly on heavenly things my mind is sett.
There is a double meaning in these lines. They can be read as meaning that, with the death of his wife, Donne is able to concentrate 'wholly' on spiritual things, now that the competition for love of God which his wife represented is gone, and indeed that is one way in which Donne understands that he could find a resolution for his grief over his dead wife: 'though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hath fed'. But it is clear that Donne is dissatisfied with this explanation, and finds it insufficient in the light of his own feelings over the loss of Anne. Perhaps before her death he would have exercised this rationalization in abstract and found it satisfactory, but now that death and loss is such a reality to him he is unable to do this: 'why should I begg more Love, when as thou / Dost wooe my soule for hers; offring all thine' is his bitter rejoinder, and he goes on in an extraordinary final passage, effectively, to rebuke God for small-minded jealousy, in finding it necessary to take away his wife in order to be sure of all his love:
And dost not only feare least I allow
My Love to Saints and Angels things divine,
But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt
Least the World, Fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out.
If the Holy Sonnets are to be read, as one scholar has argued, as evidence not of God as an active presence but rather 'of the presence of God not as an active participant in the dramatized moment but as a silent presence beyond human words and human reason' (Beaston 107), this direct addressing...
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