Death and Afterlife in John Donne’s Poetry

Abstract

John Donne is one of the artists whose obsession with death is universally recognized. The purpose of the paper is to offer an interpretation of John Donne’s view of death and afterlife in his poetry. John Donne had a deep interest in the issue of death and tried to understand it ceaselessly throughout his lifetime. Death is one of the main subjects in his poems. His effort in conquering death is reflected in Songs and Sonnets and Holy Sonnets. The death in Songs and Sonnets is not real but imaginary and fictitious. However, the death of Holy Sonnets oppresses Donne in real life. Donne’s attitude toward death can be characterized by two aspects. The first one is the positive attitude that desires death eagerly. And the other is the negative attitude that refuses death persistently. Even though these two attitudes are paradoxical and conflicted, they have something in common. Finally, they were integrated into a transcendental attitude. Donne refused to think of death as the end of life. And he claimed that the way to conquer death was only through death.