The ghost of life: Slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men

Well, we made it to the end of National Poetry Month in Year 1 of covid19. Let’s go out with one of the Greats.

Yes, I’m talking John Donne, one of the Elizabethans who spanned poetry, soldiering, politics and sundry. In his case, the church as well; he was Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death ten years later. Donne wrote some really juicy stuff in his early days; after entering the clergy, he turned his thoughts to divine love. Today’s entry is one of those holy sonnets, “Death Be Not Proud”.

Let me preface this by saying that another piece by Donne is especially pertinent at this time, when we see the head of our government trying to turn a pandemic to personal and political profit, with the side benefit of squandering about a century of global goodwill and admiration in his quest to bully and belittle, even as he ignores thousand of deaths around him. I speak, of course, of this:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Well, some folks are so stupid and so frightened, they’ll never learn that. I’m sick to the back teeth of them, but that’s where we are.

As a Catholic (first Roman and then Anglican), Donne believed that death was rather puffed up in the fear index. It’s a passage, not a wall. So he takes it on here.

“Death, Be Not Proud”

Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.