14 - Facing death

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?