Death, Be Not Proud Explication

    The poem, Death, Be Not Proud, by John Donne, is about death being no more than a short sleep. A short sleep? Who wants to go to sleep for a short while? Exactly. No one does. The poem is about so much more than the idea that dying is like resting. The Speaker in the poem is afraid.
    Through an extended metaphor and many personifications making death out to be a person, you can see that the Speaker is only trying to convince himself that death is nothing to fear. The Speaker interacts with Death as though it can respond, “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee – Mighty and dreadful, for though art not so (Line1-2).”  People view death to be ‘mighty and dreadful’; something that Death isn’t actually able to be. However, death is frightening, which is a reason that death should not be proud. No one wants to die, and the good people Death takes are only their bodies, not their physical selves, “rest if their bones and soul’s delivery (Line8)”. The Speaker is so afraid that he has to talk down to Death and make Death seem inferior to him –  “poor death, nor yet canst kill me” (Line 4).
    In lines 5-6, “ From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, - much pleasure – then, from thee much more must flow;” The poet uses a metaphor to make rest and sleep be a ‘picture’ of death. He tries to make himself believe that if he pleasures sleep so much that death couldn’t be that different. FLOW as in follow or result, is like saying that you can get so much more from death than you can rest. You would have more time being dead than you would simply resting.
    The Speaker starts to link death to slavery in line 9. “Thou art salve to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men” and like being a slave, you would never know how things would end up, what would happen to you. The different reasons that death could occur would be by chance or maybe accidents, kings like the military system, or fate – the idea that maybe your life is decreed somewhere else (death in this case would be like an executioner).  “Dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell - and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well (Line 10- 11)” Poison, war, and sickness are reasons that kind of connect to those of the last line(9). It’s chance that you’d get poisoned, kings would be that of war, and then sickness would most likely be fated. The use of poppy and charms makes me think of the Wizard of Oz which was meant to make the characters sleep forever. In the poem however, it’s used in a way that poppies or charms would ‘make us sleep as well – and better than thy stroke” as in death. The Speaker was basically saying that he’d rather die by poppies than the executioner he believes death to be. The symbolic uses of poppies are quite interesting; one is that they are symbolic to both sleep and death: sleep because of the opium extracted from them, and death because of the common blood-red color of the red poppy in particular. The second is that they are sometimes used for remembering soldiers who died during wartime – like the example of how someone would die in the earlier lines. And finally, the third use is that the bright scarlet color signifies a promise of resurrection after death – something that the Speaker desperately needs.
    The poem has an Italian-Petrachan style octave-rhyming scheme - ABBA ABBA and the next two lines are alike with CDDC.  The last couplet is somewhat mysterious because it doesn’t really fit into the rhyme scheme like the rest of the poem. However, the couplet suggests that Death itself is going to die. That’s the turn in the poem. The turn fits into the Italian sonnet scheme because the answer to the Speakers problem would be that Death would die in the end instead of himself or people in general. If people were to live eternally forever, people wouldn’t actually be ‘dead’. The Speaker, when he says, ‘thou shalt die’, is saying that he’d much rather have Death die and have people live forever.
     “One short sleep passed, we wake eternally, - And dearth shall be no more; death, thou shalt die (Line 13-14)”. The Speaker’s extended metaphor continues and ends in the last few lines as he questions whether or not there is something more after death. He tries to believe that he’ll live eternally after death, and that ‘short sleep’ isn’t made out to be that simple and dull. As the Speaker continues to try to reassure himself that Death is nothing more than sleep, he reiterates that Death should not be proud, that it’s unworthy. The Speaker continues to make Death seem inadequate and inferior to himself until the very last stanza. He’s still afraid.