Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Donne’s life: a sketch
- 2 The text of Donne’s writings
- 3 The social context and nature of Donne’s writing: occasional verse and letters
- 4 Literary contexts: predecessors and contemporaries
- 5 Donne’s religious world
- 6 Donne’s political world
- 7 Reading and rereading Donne’s poetry
- 8 Satirical writing: Donne in shadows
- 9 Erotic poetry
- 10 Devotional writing
- 11 Donne as preacher
- 12 Donne’s language: the conditions of communication
- 13 Gender matters: the women in Donne’s poems
- 14 Facing death
- 15 Donne’s afterlife
- 16 Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
14 - Facing death
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Donne’s life: a sketch
- 2 The text of Donne’s writings
- 3 The social context and nature of Donne’s writing: occasional verse and letters
- 4 Literary contexts: predecessors and contemporaries
- 5 Donne’s religious world
- 6 Donne’s political world
- 7 Reading and rereading Donne’s poetry
- 8 Satirical writing: Donne in shadows
- 9 Erotic poetry
- 10 Devotional writing
- 11 Donne as preacher
- 12 Donne’s language: the conditions of communication
- 13 Gender matters: the women in Donne’s poems
- 14 Facing death
- 15 Donne’s afterlife
- 16 Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
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?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to John Donne , pp. 217 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
- 9
- Cited by