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1. THE POWERLESSNESS OF DEATH In this sonnet, often referred to by its first line or as “Holy Sonnet 10,” the speaker directly addresses death, seeking to divest it of its powers and emphasize that man, though fated to die, is more powerful than death itself. The poem paints a picture of death as prideful—vain, even—and works to deflate death’s importance by arguing firstly that death is nothing more than a rest, and secondly that following this rest comes the afterlife, which contradicts death’s aim of bringing about a final end. With death’s powerlessness proven by the end of the poem, it is death itself, not man, who is going to die. The speaker clearly argues against death being treated as something strong and important. In essence, he reasons that nobody who dies is actually dead. Though death is personified as a boastful figure that proudly trades on its reputation as “mighty and dreadful,” the speaker, through logical argument, aims to show death as petty and weak. In order to build this picture of “poor death” as a pitiable figure, the speaker directly confronts death, insisting that “nor yet canst thou kill me” and quickly establishing the poem as a message of defiance. Death is then compared to sleep, one of the most commonplace and beneficial of all human activities. People generally feel good after sleep and rest, the poem reasons, so why shouldn’t they feel good after death? Death is simply a rest for men’s “bones”—their physical selves—while their souls move on to the afterlife. Having established death as nothing more than a restful passage between life on earth and the eternal life, the speaker presents death’s more fearful properties—represented by images like the grim reaper—as comically inaccurate. One can read the speaker's declaration that “death, thou shalt die" as his assertion that that this idea of death as something frightening and omnipotent will meet its end. The speaker of the poem thus aims to flip death on its head—its pride is misplaced because it is nothing for people to be afraid of. The speaker achieves this by literally talking down to death, making a mockery of its inflated idea of itself. The poem also paints death as “slave” to earthly things, further emphasizing death’s powerlessness. Death is associated with “fate, chance, kings … desperate men … poison, war, and sickness.” It is completely of the earth, the speaker implies, and depends upon earthly things for its existence. Death is not a master of anything, then, but a slave. Even as a form of rest, death isn’t all that impressive. Indeed, the speaker mentions “poppy” (opiate drugs) and “charms” (magic and spells) as better means of obtaining rest. Thus whichever way death is looked at, it’s inferior to something else. It is, essentially, irrelevant, summed up by the speaker's question, “why swell’st thou then?” The speaker asks death what it actually has to be prideful about. Overall, the poem's presents death as having just one function: to transition people between life and the afterlife. With its fearsome power dispelled, death itself can die. 2. Lovers as Microcosms Donne incorporates the Renaissance notion of the human body as a microcosm into his love poetry. During the Renaissance, many people believed that the microcosmic human body mirrored the macrocosmic physical world. According to this belief, the intellect governs the body, much like a king or queen governs the land. Many of Donne’s poems—most notably “The Sun Rising” (1633), “The Good-Morrow” (1633), and “A Valediction: Of Weeping” (1633)—envision a lover or pair of lovers as being entire worlds unto themselves. But rather than use the analogy to imply that the whole world can be compressed into a small space, Donne uses it to show how lovers become so enraptured with each other that they believe they are the only beings in existence. The lovers are so in love that nothing else matters. For example, in “The Sun Rising,” the speaker concludes the poem by telling the sun to shine exclusively on himself and his beloved. By doing so, he says, the sun will be shining on the entire world. The Neoplatonic Conception of Love Donne draws on the Neoplatonic conception of physical love and religious love as being two manifestations of the same impulse. In the Symposium (ca. third or fourth century b.c.e.), Plato describes physical love as the lowest rung of a ladder. According to the Platonic formulation, we are attracted first to a single beautiful person, then to beautiful people generally, then to beautiful minds, then to beautiful ideas, and, ultimately, to beauty itself, the highest rung of the ladder. Centuries later, Christian Neoplatonists adapted this idea such that the progression of love culminates in a love of God, or spiritual beauty. Naturally, Donne used his religious poetry to idealize the Christian love for God, but the Neoplatonic conception of love also appears in his love poetry, albeit slightly tweaked. For instance, in the bawdy “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1669), the speaker claims that his love for a naked woman surpasses pictorial representations of biblical scenes. Many love poems assert the superiority of the speakers’ love to quotidian, ordinary love by presenting the speakers’ love as a manifestation of purer, Neoplatonic feeling, which resembles the sentiment felt for the divine. 3. Religious Enlightenment as Sexual Ecstasy Throughout his poetry, Donne imagines religious enlightenment as a form of sexual ecstasy. He parallels the sense of fulfillment to be derived from religious worship to the pleasure derived from sexual activity—a shocking, revolutionary comparison, for his time. In Holy Sonnet 14 (1633), for example, the speaker asks God to rape him, thereby freeing the speaker from worldly concerns. Through the act of rape, paradoxically, the speaker will be rendered chaste. In Holy Sonnet 18 (1899), the speaker draws an analogy between entering the one true church and entering a woman during intercourse. Here, the speaker explains that Christ will be pleased if the speaker sleeps with Christ’s wife, who is “embraced and open to most men” (14). Although these poems seem profane, their religious fervor saves them from sacrilege or scandal. Filled with religious passion, people have the potential to be as pleasurably sated as they are after sexual activity. 4.The Search for the One True Religion Donne’s speakers frequently wonder which religion to choose when confronted with so many churches that claim to be the one true religion. In 1517, an Augustinian monk in Germany named Martin Luther set off a number of debates that eventually led to the founding of Protestantism, which, at the time, was considered to be a reformed version of Catholicism. England developed Anglicanism in 1534, another reformed version of Catholicism. This period was thus dubbed the Reformation. Because so many sects and churches developed from these religions, theologians and laypeople began to wonder which religion was true or right. Written while Donne was abandoning Catholicism for Anglicanism, “Satire 3” reflects these concerns. Here, the speaker wonders how one might discover the right church when so many churches make the same claim. The speaker of Holy Sonnet 18 asks Christ to explain which bride, or church, belongs to Christ. Neither poem forthrightly proposes one church as representing the true religion, but nor does either poem reject outright the notion of one true church or religion.