The Theme Of Death In The Poetry Of John Donne
Human nature is that of uncertainties. As we live in a world that every Human being is plagued by the uncertainties surrounded by death. Although there are some guarantees in life as Carey elucidates, one thing that we cannot be sure of is death because it occurs independent of time and every time we are living we are awaiting death to come knocking our doors someday. John Donne as a poet was known for his complex life view on the areas of love, death, and spirituality. As Carey describes him “his complex attitudes and exceptional aptitude of combining these three allows him to demonstration controversial and appealing opinions that sometimes agree and conflict with each other. ”
Like every other poet in the baroque period, Donne had a metaphysical approach towards his poetry that went beyond physical world, to a world that hinted that of spiritual experience. As someone who was convinced that there was an afterlife done found himself trapped in a quagmire of ideas that made him totally unable to settle on a particular set of viewpoints on the subject. He had lived a lustrous life as evident with the images that he creates in his poetry about women and his deliberate objectification of women's body in his poetry. While a great deal of his poetry touches on this subject in an unorthodox way, there is a clear connection of how these three subjects are put into parallel with each other in way that they seem to be at the epicenter of Donne poetry. This paper attempts to examine how John Donne explores the theme of death and the way it nurtures his spiritual experience and fosters his relationship with God.
From his Holy sonnets, John Donne understanding of sin as cause of death evident in sonnet IV. His description of sin with invigorating poetic dexterity allows him to portray how sin draws human beings away from achieving a close relationship with God. He ties how original sin acts as the origin of death in mankind. This poem opens another side of John Donne who is rich in theological knowledge and he uses it as a point of protest against death in his poetry. The poem shows Donne's appropriation of biblical knowledge as way of living in his life. As portrayed in 1 Corinthians 15:21 that wages of death sin are death. Donne clearly comprehends the severity of God's judgment falling upon man and his realization that he is a sinner travails his soul. He appeals to God to delay the judgment day to give him some time to repent. He has set this poem such that the speaker who feels that he is a sinner is asking God to give him time to mourn for the dead and he is also worried that he wants to have no time left to repent his sins. He talks to God pleading to him to let him repent his sins while on earth before it's too late.
John Donne realizes the importance of a good relationship with God before dying as he believes in afterlife that is only possible if his relationship with God is intact and, in his realization, that human nature is that of sinning, Donne is pleading with God to teach him how to repent so that he can be among the righteous during judgment day. As we talked in class he is asking God as in Romans 6:7 to save him by the grace so that he will not be among those who will be judged by the law. In Hymn to God in my sickness, John Donne faith and his belief in afterlife gives him the view that death is temporary and it is a bridge towards reaching eternity and living with God. This belief enables Donne to a achieve a different kind of freedom to enable him to express love through the theme of death by equating death to a sexual act or a short-lived affair. In this poem, Donne explores death in true metaphysical nature prompting him to compare it with lust which occupies the greater part of his carnal desires. As Oliver depicts in his essay this represents a part of Donne poetry that deals with death directly and a part that shows that death draws humans closer to achieving an eternal relationship with God. It also portrays death like a bridge to a spiritual experience in its entire metaphysical nature. This leads to an emergence of a view of death as being insignificant, or a rite of passage that humans should avoid fearing or viewing with distaste as it’s just a bridge that connects humans to the eternal life promised by God. This poem portrays Donne imagination as that one that is hospitable to the concept of death. He prays for death like that on a thing that humans should approach with strenuous struggle and with a preparation to embark on the next phase of eternal life. As Stein elucidates in his essay, this hospitable attitude towards death might have been influenced by John Donne Christian upbringing that stressed on working hard towards fulfilling one's calling on earth before embarking on the journey to afterlife.
In this case, John Donne refers towards facing death in order to achieve peace and tranquility in the afterlife. Donne's holy sonnets creates a world where man is able to triumph over death. with a solid biblical knowledge from the book of romans in the bible where Paul talks about the day of judgment and Deliverance by grace. Donne portrays this in his poetry where he creates a world where Christ atonement of for sin and his dying on the cross to save humanity sins by his blood brings life and creates a path for those considered as sinners to get to experience an afterlife with him if they repent and accept him as their personal savior as indicated in the book of romans.
Donne`s following lines in Sonnet XVI, he puts the idea of contrasting death with the fear of loss of honor as unfounded and to his death. According to Donne, Spiritual death renders man morally impotent. Going back to the bible “dead in trespasses and sins” which is what Donne is referring here surpasses that of physical death. This is because a man who is dead in spirit is incapable of bearing good fruit because he is completely overpowered by human frailty. Also, from his writing, it seems John Donne himself had close personal experience of death which might have contributed significantly to his radical view on death. First, he lost five of his children who died during infancy, and Donne himself seems to have wrestled with what we would now diagnose as serious depression which might have lead him to have constant worries of death. It’s during this time that he wrote most of his death themed poetry, one of the best examples being the poem Serious ailment.
“Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God” a poem that he wrote as one of his nineteen sonnets while in Anglican Church is one of the intensely personal sonnets the Donne wrote in his life. In this poem, John Donne depicts in the military and marital terms ensuing from his relationship with God. The poem has fourteen lines that of the first four lines being comprising a rhyme scheme that scheme and their own image, that of a marital relationship. The last two lines of the sestet form a couplet; they rhyme with each other and bring together the thought of the octet and the sestet in a fashion that calls for curiosity and close attention to the reader about the power and range running through his mind. At this point Donne is wrestling with his consciousness as he is about to leave his way of life and live in a much more much religious inspired life. Later as Donne matured, his image changed from that of John Donne - the Donne writing with the lust of engraved in his heart - to that of John Donne inspired by scripture.
Also, his poetry also changed, as this poem shows. After he took acclimates into a religious inspired life, he directs his love poetry not to women but to God who has given him a second chance to turn around his life. He becomes more respectful to women and his poetry is no longer driven by lust. He diverges from the sardonic indifference of some of his earlier poetry with the submissiveness of faith, and the shocking conceits of his earlier writing softened. However, his intellect remains as imaginative and calculative as ever, and his exceptional imagery and love of paradox still defines a great part of his poetry. In this poem, however, unlike earlier poems, the metaphors do not shock; they are fairly standard in Christian writing in the seventeenth century.
One thing that is distinctive in this poem is Donne’s argumentative wit, and perhaps the change in his honesty that is characterized with an ongoing struggle between his body and his soul. “Death be not Proud” is on one of the most thoughtful poems on death that Donne ever wrote. In this poem the speaker tells Death that it should not be proud and points out that although people think of it as “Mighty and dreadful” it not what people seem to perceive it as. Donne elaborates that those that people think to have been killed by death are not truly dead but have taken a journey through the pleasurable path to rest their bones and enjoy the delivery of their soul. This takes us in Donne’s inner thought of Death as a short sleep after which the dead will awake during judgment day to begin the new chapter of eternal life. One interesting point in this poem is when the speaker compares death with charms and puppies and he says that they can make men sleep better than Death so Death should not be proud. In the third stanza the speaker mocks death as inferior to drugs and wraps the thought by saying that because there is afterlife which is eternal when a person dies it’s not the person who have died but rather it’s the death that has died. This is because that person will never be afraid of death again nor he/she will encounter death again in his lifetime. Although it seems counterintuitive to say that death dies, this poem saw an attempt of Donne to free himself from the fear of death and to solidify his belief in afterlife. This is why in his next poem Hymn of God in my sickness, a poem that he wrote when he had a fever, shows Donne final attempt to give a sermon to his soul so that he can have time to repent and be among the righteous during the judgement day.
“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”, is the last poem that Donne ever wrote and thus they paint a good picture of the poetic interests John Donne maintained late in life after his wife’s death and after he decides to become a priest. The poem gives a good picture of a man eager to delve deep and have a deeper relationship with God. A closer look in the poem shows a greater shift in Donne intellectual interests and sudden change in interest in maps and geography. In this, John Donne reveals his own interest in and knowledge of geography, referring to Jerusalem, Gibraltar, the Pacific Ocean, and the Bering Strait, which had become a hoped-for passage to Eastern riches. He starts exploring the geography indicated in the Bible. Donne likes his Doctor to cosmographers and himself as map lying on bed to be displayed. Nay scholars argue whether Donne wrote this poem on his deathbed as the tone in the poem as it offers his last attempt to offer a sermon to his soul. In this poem he talks about how in Christianity setting the East not only symbolizes direction but also symbolizes birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ, how the West symbolizes death, and how just as on a map East and West merge, so birth fades into death and death into resurrection. He refers Jesus Christ as the second Adam and he notes that both Adam are unified in his soul and he can feel the sweat of the first Adam in his face. He also asks God to receive him with opens as he is wrapped in the purple of Christ and give a sermon to his soul. If Donne didn’t write this in his death bed probably he thought that the fever that he had would end up killing him and that’s why he is attempting to be even closer to God. As a man in a continuous search for truths and certainties' in life, Donne explored how various aspects of life such as love, death, and spiritual experience cemented his relationship with God. Donne also spent much of his time in contemplation of both dying and death and how his relationship with God would guide him towards triumphing over physical death by the sheer promise of eternal life. One of his classical metaphysical moment is his innocuous reasoning of Death dying in the poem “Death be not proud” which is counterintuitive but his reasoning gives him hope for afterlife which he believes will commence after judgment day.
Another interesting perspective that done gives on death is his believe in spiritual love in the poem “A valediction: forbidding Mourning” where he argues that since two lovers’ souls are one a departure on one lover simply expands the are covered by the unified souls. He wrote this after his wife dead and it gives a perception that he feels that his wife is still not dead but with him.
Throughout his collective works, Donne sought to substantialize life’s uncertainties, such as love, lust, and power, by incorporating them and comparing them with the absolute of death. The irony is that he later equated love with death hence creating a world where his passion and Lust triumphed over physical death. This unique paradoxical combination of death and love, unlike concepts, provided Donne with the means in which to cope with death that he experienced such as loss of his wife and five kids and how this tragedies influenced the rebirth of his relationship with God and made him him to become an Anglican priest.
