Defeating Death: Shakespeare and Donne

Love is perhaps the most oft expressed theme in poetry, or in any art form for that matter. However, the expression of love is often complicated, and sometimes it is complicated by death. Mortality, the inevitability of one’s own death, and the relentlessness of time all appeared in the poems of both William Shakespeare and John Donne. The two poets expressed concern regarding death in many of their works, but they were both also able to find unique ways to rise above and conquer death in their minds’.

In Shakespeare’s sonnets the issue of ravaging time and mortality were raised mostly with reference to a beautiful male lover who the speaker did not want to see become a victim of decay and death. The speaker finds the solution in poetry. It is through the written word that the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnets is able to conquer death. He believes in his own ability to “ingraft” his lover a new in his verse (1063). In “Sonnet 18,” he brags, “When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:/So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” (1063). The sonnets are filled with similar boasts of the speaker’s ability to defy death through poetry.

The speakers in John Donne’s poems try to defeat death as well, but with different methods. For these speakers, love itself is the way to escape the forceful decay of time and death. In the first stanza of “The Sun Rising,” the speaker explains, “Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,/Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time,”(1266). The speaker believes that love defeats the movement of time; for people in love there is no movement forward, no decay. The female narrator of “Break of Day,” questions the power of time as well, “Why should we rise because ‘tis light?/Did we lie down because ‘twas night?” (1270). Although these lines are delivered in a carefree, playful mood they still evidence Donne’s hope that in love there existed a respite from the power of time.

Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” also witness a speaker who is concerned with mortality but is able to conquer it in his mind, in his case, through God. In the opening line of the first sonnet the speaker asks, “Thou has made me, and shall thy work decay?” (1295). Clearly death is on his mind and is causing him angst, but he is able to find strength in God. The best representation of the belief that eternal life lies with faith in God is “Sonnet 10.” In this poem the speaker questions the power of death, “And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die,” (1297). In the face of God’s promise of forgiveness and heaven, death has no sway and gives no reason to fear.

One’s own mortality and the inescapable procession of time are concepts that can drive a person mad. In reality they are impossible to stop, but since the problem isn’t so much time itself as the angst it causes, what is truly important is only mentally defeating it. Shakespeare and Donne put forth several options for how best to overcome. Whatever works.