You read John Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud" from his HolySonnets. As a seventeenth-century clergyman, Donne probably hadalot of experience with death, particularly in managing funerals ofhis congregants. Speaking of 9/11, I was living and working inManhattan that morning (I had completed my Ph.D. at NYU and wasteaching a year at Hofstra University). After that horrible day,people posted "Missing" posters throughout the city with picturesof their missing loved-ones who had worked in the WTC towers, andasked readers to call them if they had information. The tragedy isthat their loved-one wasn't missing; most of us (even the peoplemaking the posters?) knew they were likely killed in the terroristattack (close to 3,000 Americans perished within seconds). But thepeople who lost loved-ones still produced "Missing" posters, andmany of them attached poetry to the photos. I saw Donne's HolySonnet #10 on more posters than any other poem. All of which is tosay: Donne's sonnet did something for humans in New York who weresuffering an immediate and unthinkably violent loss. Some criticsgo so far to claim that literature can help readers suffering fromtraumatic events (aka events that literally cannot be spoken ordescribed by the victims to the events' horror). Thus, poems mightspeak the previously unspeakable and, therefore, initiate healing.One possible function of Donne's Holy Sonnet #10 (a function thathas alot of strong evidence for it) is that Donne's sonnet (a 14line poem with a specific rhyme scheme that could be sung since"sonnet" comes from the Italian sonnetta, which means "littlesong"), uses personification to do something with Death that cannotbe done in any type of writing beyond poetry. Thus, Donne's poemshows what poetry can do that no other type of human communicationor writing can do.

Identify the effect of Donne's personifying "Death" on readers.What do you think Donne's personification of Death allows Donne todo to this "unspeakable" (after all, who likes talking aboutDeath?) inevitability of every human life? Something that he wouldnot be able to do in any other type of writing?

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John Donne in his poemDeath Be Not Proud personify death in order to explain the phenomenon of death ... View the full answer