Death And Life In John Donne's Divine Meditation X
1364 Words6 Pages
The concepts of Death and Life in John Donne’s Divine Meditation X
John Donne “is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. […] Donne's style is characterized by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations” (poemhunter). In his “Divine Meditation X” (also known as “Holy Sonnet X”), Donne addresses Death and presents an argument against its power. According to the speaker, such power is nothing but an illusion; so the end Death brings to men is just a temporary cessation from tediousness. Death’s power is subjected to other forces; it is a “slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men / And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell…” (lin. 9-10). Death does not control men, but rather inhabits them as a balancing component of a collage of forces. Finally, the poet sentences Death to an end: “Death, thou shalt die” (lin. 14), because elimination of Death will enable Life’s existence.…show more content… Taking into account the fact that in his Holy Sonnets, Donne uses the same literary strategies found in the Bible, the aim of this essay is to observe the use of personification, analogy, metaphor and paradox in John Donne’s sonnet discussed in "Literary Forms and Strategies in the Bible" by David Jasper and Stephen Prickett as to understand the conceptual progression of Death and