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14 - Facing death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

Achsah Guibbory
Affiliation:
Barnard College, New York
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Summary

John Donne spent much of his life anticipating his death. Although similar claims could be made for many seventeenth-century English men and women, for whom death was a constant presence, Donne had an unusually active relationship to his mortality. As readers of his poems and prose immediately understand, Donne was gripped by a tremendous fear of death, and his writings return again and again to strategies for conquering this fear. However, at the same time that Donne dreaded the moment of death, he also repeatedly seemed to invite it. Donne was a deeply theatrical person, and he was perhaps at his most theatrical when he attempted to stage the actual instant when his soul would depart from his body. From his Holy Sonnets, which begin with lines like ''This is my playes last scene,'' or ''What if this present were the worlds last night?''; to his meditations on the tolling church bells outside his window as he lay in his sick-bed in Devotions; to his innumerable letters anticipating his imminent death; Donne positioned himself again and again on the threshold between this world and the next. What can explain this singular obsession with confronting death? And why was it, as his collected works attest, so powerful an imaginative tool?

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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  • Facing death
  • Edited by Achsah Guibbory, Barnard College, New York
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to John Donne
  • Online publication: 28 November 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521832373.014
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  • Facing death
  • Edited by Achsah Guibbory, Barnard College, New York
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to John Donne
  • Online publication: 28 November 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521832373.014
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Facing death
  • Edited by Achsah Guibbory, Barnard College, New York
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to John Donne
  • Online publication: 28 November 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521832373.014
Available formats
×