The Pride of Death

"And soonest our best men with thee do go,..." -"Death, be not proud" by John Donne

     I enjoyed this poem because the theme was much more sentimental, applicable, and common than most poems which I have read so far. The speaker uses apostrophe and personification to refer to death. I find this quite astute because over time death has shown that it can be cruel and calculated to even the best of people. The speaker illustrates death as a cowardly killer. He says that death takes away the best of us while the immoral live on. It dwells in war, poison, and sickness. All of these forms of death are not disguised in kings and lawless men because they are the ones we expect to die to. It is disguised in places the moral people never see coming. I know that this is especially applicable to sickness as well. Death hides in sickness and forces men with indomitable wills to deal with its proceedings. Yet, there are murderers and rapists running the streets without a care of mortality. I thought, at first, the last stanza was just a feeble attempt to injure an immovable constant like death. However, I realized the truth in the statement. Just like personifying death is a mental function, we can mentally overcome death by seriously focusing on its fleeting influence. We can look to the afterlife and notice that death is simply our means to get there.