Mortal Pretensions in John Donne’s “Deat...

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0:47 Wes: You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet. John Donne's biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps it's no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610 and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea. Change in Dunne. Subject matter from the secular to the sacred reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin. Today we're discussing Sonnet 10 in this series, Death, Be Not Proud, an address of death personified whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne's dazzling poetic rhetoric. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes Dunn is a great love poet, of course, but I would argue that I think he's a great poet of death. That might be his greatest subject matter. And when I put quotes around that term, great poet of death and put it into a Google search out of curiosity, I saw that Whitman is supposed to be the greatest poet of death. For my money, he's not even the great American poet of death. That would be Dickinson. But I don't know. I mean, I guess there are a lot of contenders for that title. And I was thinking a lot in preparing for this episode about the relationship between poetry and death, or at least things that are sort of death adjacent. Poetry and grief poetry and mourning, the elegy, of course, being one of the great poetic forms. So I'm curious who you think is great on death if you have an answer for that. And maybe why death is so present in so many poems as a way to start us off.

2:57 Erin: Well, the first person I thought of was Shakespeare. And then I was thinking, well, that's kind of an obvious and lame association. But then in thinking about poetry and death, I thought of the phrase undiscovered country. Right. Is that the right?

3:11 Wes: Mm.

3:12 Erin: And the way in which something that is puzzling and paradoxical and ineffable, a nothing can be grasped. I mean, on the one hand, there's the terror of death, the inevitability of death, the death of loved ones and life and sorts of things that make good subjects for poetic reflection. And I guess the question is what the point of that is. Maybe it's therapeutic or something. But then the other aspect is just that it's because it's something that can't be represented in any direct way as an experience. Right. You can describe a dead body, but it has to be gotten at in this more indirect, metaphorical way. So I think this type of subject, I guess, love and death are really the most. There's a lot of opportunity there, I guess, let's put it that way.

4:03 Wes: Right. I'm thinking a little about maybe about Keats as an anti death poet. I can't decide if someone is a death poet or an anti death poet. And I think maybe that tension reveals something like maybe anyone who writes about death is also in the act of writing about it, is staving it off, obviously. And I do think that love and death, or especially sex and death, are pretty closely linked. I think that, you know, this sort of emotional climax in a poem, or even like the beats inherent with each line and the turn back to the beginning that happens at the end of each line of a poem. It's very reminiscent to me of like, the climax contains within it, like the diminution or the demotion, demise itself. So we have these peaks and valleys, maybe a bit dramatic to say that those are sort of like, I don't know, flights of fancy or great vivacity or vitality, to use words, connected with life. And then the dying off of the end of the line or the dying at the end of the poem, as it were, is connected with a kind of death. So I think that waxing and waning, or that ecstasy followed by evacuation, you might say, is very close to love and sex. Of course, you know, these things very much mirror, I think, our experiences of not just of life's up and down kind of trajectory, but also the fact that we have at the end the eternal death waiting for us, not just the end of the line or the end of the poem that it kind of predicts.

5:40 Erin: I would add to that the use of metaphor, especially the metaphysical conceit. Right. Which Dunn was accused of and criticized for. But this bringing together very different things is one as the metaphor for the other. And then maybe the introduction of paradox, too. But the use of metaphor, and we've talked about this a little bit on the show, but is in collapsing distinctions is evocative of merger, of the collapse of distinctions and things just kind of dissolving into oneness. Right. You could say that one could think of the whole world sort of being reduced in that way to these metaphorical commonalities and distinctions falling apart. And so there's merger, which is evocative of like an early symbiotic relationship with the mother, something prior to separation and individuation. And on the other side of that, there's the kind of dissolution of distinctions that you get in death. And the merger. Right. With the natural environment, with the body, at least. Right. And if you're religious, whatever it is that an afterlife means in that context, perhaps some kind of merger or union with God or heaven or something like that.

6:54 Wes: I am really interested in that. I'm also thinking just about the sort of merger of form and content, like, inherent in poetry or in the poetic line. And I just. The more I looked at the form on the page, you know, I was thinking about the sonnet as a kind of a coffin, right? Like a box. Something that's been famously commented on many times. Like Wordsworth has that great sonnet, nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room. This idea that the sonnet itself is this little membrane that keeps all its contents within it. And we have this merger too, within the sonnet of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean forms that Donne is working with. Right. And which. Which is also like this mashup at this time is not particularly uncommon. And it's true of several of the Holy Sonnets, I think. But it takes advantage then of these two turns because of this mashup. So there's like. There's the turn in the. In the traditional place after the eighth line. But then there's also this turn right before or right in the final couplet in this very typically Shakespearean kind of mood, so that you have two climaxes in the po. It's self contained, it's box like, coffin like. But it also has a lot of movement within that. And A lot of different kinds of registers coming together.

8:13 Erin: Interesting. Do you want to read it?

8:15 Wes: Yeah. Okay. This is one of the many poems that I had my students recite in school. And sometimes I would have to hear this, like, four times a day. So I have this one memorized. All right, here we go. Death be not proud. Death be not proud Though some have called thee mighty and dreadful for thou art not so for those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow Die not, poor death, Nor yet canst thou kill me from rest and sleep which but thy pictures be much pleasure Then from thee much more must flow and soonest our best men with thee do go Rest of their bones and souls delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men and dost with poison, war and sickness dwell and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well and better than thy stroke. Why swell' st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die.

9:20 Erin: Very nice. Exactly the way I would have read it. So you get this personification of death, but also his addressing death directly and giving death a command. This is like this imperative mode. Was something Dunn did, I guess, in several poems. And there's one with the sun. Right. Go away, go away sun. Is that what it's called?

9:48 Wes: Unruly, busy sun, son, go away, Come back another day. Busy something fool. Unruly son, Busy, unruly fool. Die something. Anyway. Yeah. I love that poem.

10:02 Erin: Yeah. In this case, there's also the. There's the accusation of death being proud, which is a curious and unexpected accusation, I think. Right. It's not what we would think of as the first thing to dislike about death, even a personified death. So I think here it's hard for me not to think immediately of death as in the classically personified death. And the shroud and with the scythe and all that stuff. And going around touching people and bringing them off to. So that kind of personification of death. That death is a kind of meager creature, in a way. Silent. And if you pull back the cloak, just bones. And here the idea that his death has swollen and proud. And I suppose, the. So conscious of its own power, I guess, so over the psyches of human beings. So we go from our own. The pivot is from our fear of death to. Not directly to the idea of an afterlife for an eternity. But instead, the fear of death is counterposed with this attack on the pride of the personified.

11:17 Wes: I just love the fact that this imperative at the beginning is a negative Rather than a positive imperative. So just thinking about how crappy this poem would be if it was like, death, be humble. You know, something like that, right? Like, the negation, I think, identifies it, brings death down. It sort of removes, like, a kind of power there from the adjective that we want to assign to death. And it's sort of killing death, like it's killing our sort of beliefs about death. Even if they are, as you say, and I think they are unexpected beliefs that he's putting into our mouths a little bit. I think it's this very negation. The two nots that we get from the beginning are kind of already performing what's gonna happen in that last line. It's already kind of killing death a little bit with just the way that the phrases are structured. And I'm thinking, too, like, what you say about being proud and being puffed up and swollen, as death is called in the third to last line. That made me think about the fact that images of being puffed up, of being swollen, that are inherent in pride, are also, like, literally. I mean, I can't help thinking this just because Donne is such a bodily poet. But I'm thinking about, like, a swollen corpse. And since death in this poem, what's so weird about the movement of this poem, which we could obviously talk about, and maybe you agree, maybe you don't, in the end, it's transformed into something that isn't even death. Or it's repeatedly evacuated, displaced somehow, as in these negations. But by the end, I feel like it's been transformed maybe into something. And so that image of a swollen corpse is really interesting because that in itself is not death. That's like someone's body. It's death maybe working on that body in some way. Death is definitely acting on this body, but it's also, like, literally sort of replacing, like the. The only image that we can have of death is of its action on an actual human being. So the personification is sort of immediately being, in my mind, kind of twisted into a diminishment of death's force. Because really, the only way that we can conceptualize it as you're saying, is, like, to visualize the human being affected by that death.

13:28 Erin: That is spot on, in my view. I just did a little free writing, rewriting of the poem as an exercise. I thought, well, how would I attack death? And at one point I said, these agencies are life's agency, and you master only the effect. Slave to the lawfulness of matter and form, the way they wind down. I Suspected I would just reveal something about Dunn's poem by doing that, which I think you just did, which is to say even the beginning, by personifying death, you've defeated death because you've created a creature, right? And everything happens within this terrain of life, and terrain of life, everything happens within that frame, right? So someone dying in a way, that's a thing of life, right? Those are biological forces and natural laws at work. And you know, and if you have to depict death as a kind of. To think about death, you have to depict it as a kind of creature or ghost in a way. But it's still. It's a humanoid form and it gives you some sense of the predominance of life or the greater power of life in a way. And then finally, I think the way you put it was effects, right? Death is the effect, but it's not an agency or a power in a way, right? The power is what happens within life. It's part of the rules of life, right? Which is that for whatever reason, reason, the imperative of a living thing is to die, whether of an old age or through an accident. But again, those are the forces of life at work, even in their own termination. And then the effect is death. And that lack of power sort of parallels the nothingness and the difficult even imagining. How do you personify something that is nothing, right? least as far as we can speculate within our own experience. Either one is. Believes in an afterlife and think that experience continues in some form, or one posits a nothingness that is inconceivable. So this complete cessation of experience, that's great.

15:31 Wes: You're even making me look at the second line. Perhaps I'm overreading, but those last three hard beats that are great art. Not so now I've just put a square around art. Not, you know, I know of course art is just the antiquated form of are. But now I'm seeing it as, you know, not art. So we have this idea that some. I've heard some people out there call you mighty and dreadful. And I'm thinking about this in relationship to overthrow, which it's yoked to in the next line. It's just like, is Death supposed to be a king? Is Death supposed to be. Or a usurper? Is it supposed to be an army? What other things are mighty and dreadful that would be. Or in other words, what kind of collection of images is that supposed to call up for death personified, I wonder.

16:22 Erin: Well, I'm trying to think if it's Just a strange way to think about it or not. We think of death as dreadful. But it's not until you start thinking poetically, I think, that you start thinking of it as this mighty force. Or at least rhetorically. And I think he even talks about death a lot that way in his later writings. Just skimmed some of his sermons. And he just got more and more preoccupied with death, I think, as time went on. And seemed quite morbid about it. Despite the religious hope that it's supposed to be vindicating. But I think, you know, again, we're prone to think of that dreadfulness. But the power part and the pride. The pride part is the consciousness of power. And then the mightiness is power here. So you're trying to deflate something that. Or I guess convince Death that he's not all that. You know, I guess if you were right to write this more straightforwardly. The approach would be to say, hey, everyone, don't worry about Death. It's not so bad as long as you're not a sinner. Or as long as you atone and are saved, or something like that. And the one you would be trying to persuade is human beings. Right. Instead of Death himself. And the argument would be, it's the thing that we get at the end is that there's an eternal waking. That death isn't what it seems to be. So then, you know, the question is, what is the significance of saying, okay, it's not human beings I'm directly trying to persuade in this poem, but Death himself that he's not so mighty and dreadful?

17:53 Wes: Do you mean almost in like a talismanic kind of way like this is done talking to his own mortality.

18:00 Erin: I'm just thinking of the conceit of the poem as personified death. And speaking to that persuading that. I keep wanting to call it a creature, although that's not a good word, but that being. But yeah, I mean, I think speaking to his own morality. What are you thinking there? That sounds promising.

18:16 Wes: Well, I'm thinking about the fact that in the fourth line, when we finally get Death acting in a Truly. It's when Death actually kills the speaker kills Dunn himself. I think that overthrow is a violent word, but to me it's a bit abstracted. Die earlier, die not poor Death, nor yet those you think thou dost overthrow. Die not poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. Overthrow feels to me a bit abstracted. Die almost like emphasizes Death's victims there. There's a bit of passivity. And so it highlights what death does. As a kind of byproduct of sorts. This happens to people rather than death actively working on them. And this is one of the interesting things about having a personified poem about a subject which could also be a verb. So, of course, overthrow and death too, here are tied up in further sort of evacuations of death's power. So there's like this misapprehension, right. You would think that it's mighty and dreadful, Right. You think it overthrows you, but it doesn't. And then the negation, the repeated knots. But here, finally, we get death actually killing someone, and that is the speaker himself. So Dunn is the one who's. Who's taking the blow, as it were.

19:38 Erin: He's saying, nor yet canst thou kill me.

19:41 Wes: Right.

19:42 Erin: So what are you just thinking? The image is evoked of.

19:46 Wes: Yeah, the landing on me, I think, is really evocative there. Like, of course, on the one hand, as you're saying this is a persuasion of death, it's also being performed for an audience of readers who are hopefully going to find the object being that they find the threat or the promise of their own death to be diminished, their fear of it to be diminished. But I think by doing that, what's interesting about the poem and what Donne understands really well about poetry is that you have to kind of like, put yourself on the line in every poem. And, you know, he's, like, very good at the performative. I think this is why he was such an effective speaker and sermonizer. And so he. I like the fact that it lands. The sentence lands on me. That's significant for me.

20:39 Erin: Well, you were pointing to the word overthrow, which I think is interesting because it turns us to a martial metaphor that sheds light on mighty and dreadful, so. Or it sheds a new light on that. And it reminds me of Sonnet 14, Holy Sonnet 14, which we'll be doing next. But where sexual and martial metaphors are kind of combined. The idea of a God reaching us by sort of overthrowing our citadel. So for those whom thou thinkst, thou dost overthrow. So the image I get connecting those two things, mighty and dreadful and pride and overthrowing someone riding into war. It's hard not to think of Game of Thrones now with the White Walkers.

21:25 Wes: I was thinking of Helm's Deep when you made the reference to batter my Heart. I was like, right, they're the orcs. Like, God is the orcs trying to get into Helm's Deep.

21:34 Erin: Anyway, sorry, but, you know, so zombie creatures who are also regal and proud and warlike and proud of their warlike effectiveness. Right. So you can. An army, a horde, let's say, might think of itself as death incarnate. And the. I'm thinking of Apocalypse Now, Death from above. Right on the helicopter and Lt. Kilgore. So this position of being the personification of death, I think warriors and soldiers, and even maybe we do this ourselves in our daily lives in various ways, but thinking of ourselves, thinking of our own effectiveness, or thinking of the ultimate form of effectiveness as lying in the capacity to deliver death to others. So for instance, it's one thing to induce admiration in others. That's one form of power. And the whole idea is to make the consciousness of the other submit and serve our own self consciousness or our own sense of being. But the ultimate power is to just extinguish the other consciousness. Especially if it is not in line, if it doesn't share the right values, if it's, you know, other different, if it's disrespectful, if it doesn't flatter one's pride. So going from that martial metaphor, we get people that think it overthrows die. Not so. So we go back to death overthrowing. It sounds like overthrowing a regime or a king, something like that. Right. But now we go back to just you think you overthrow them, but they don't die. There's a little bit of a lack of a parallel parallelism there, but. And you can't kill me either.

23:10 Wes: We are the kings, the people that death tries to kill. But we're still sort of kings in exile or something. I don't know.

23:15 Erin: I like that. No usurpation. So then the question is why what that means? Why, of course, literally death does kill me. What does it mean then?

23:25 Wes: Before we move on? I'm really stuck on this third line for its sound and its rhythm, even more than its sense. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts, because I literally don't. I've been trying to puzzle this out. I find that third line to be really indelicate or something. Like we have all of these one syllable words until overthrow, obviously. Three syllable word and it's like almost silly for those whom thou thinks thou

23:54 Erin: dost overthrow, but of th sounds, say thou, say thou, thinkest thou five times fast.

24:01 Wes: But yeah, then we get that really interesting reversed foot in the middle of that line. Think' st thou where the stress is not where it should be, or it's consciously reversed so that the emphasis is not on thou or death, but on thinking. It's reduced in the sort of imagination as well as in the sense of

24:27 Erin: the line, is it a double stress? Thinkst thou troche? Is that what you would call it or.

24:33 Wes: Yeah, troche would be stressed unstressed. You're saying it's a spondi.

24:37 Erin: Spondi. Spondi. Spondi.

24:39 Wes: Yep, spondi. I think it's trochaic.

24:41 Erin: Okay.

24:42 Wes: Because then thinkst thou dost overthrow. Yeah, I think it's a trochee. That's how I would read it anyway. Because it's. Because it's a qualification for those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow. I think thinkst is actually the highest point of that line.

24:55 Erin: Right. I agree with that. Yeah, definitely.

24:58 Wes: So it diminishes the vow that follows it. And if you kind of like are running up to thinkst it a little bit makes even the stress of the thou preceding it to it dwarfs it by comparison.

25:11 Erin: This is the type of use of a more natural speaking sound that done was criticized for. Right. By Johnson and others. And as I guess it's inklings of modernism. Right. T.S. eliot was a big fan. And it creates different rhetorical possibilities, I think. So it's apt to the attempt to persuade to thinkst. Right. Thinks you think, but it's not true. So to have that tenting there right in the middle of the line.

25:36 Wes: But you're not bothered by this series of single syllable words seems kind of plodding to me.

25:43 Erin: Or those whom thou thinkst thou dost. Yeah, I guess I didn't notice that it's all one syllable until the last word. Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm bothered by it. But what bothers you?

25:56 Wes: Well, even in the following. Well, because it's sort of ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, it's a little bit chimy. Like for instance, in the following line. Actually, now I'm just noticing the following line consists entirely of single syllable words and yet we don't notice it as much.

26:12 Erin: It's almost like because it's broken up, there's some pauses or the cadences there.

26:17 Wes: That's right. That's a really good point. But also I think that weirdly for me, the alliteration in the third line is calling attention to a kind of choppiness, even as the th sound would seemingly serve to make it a little bit more smooth and mellifluous. Instead it calls attention to something about the line that's almost silly to me.

26:39 Erin: Yeah, I mean, I see what you're saying. You get more. The first two lines Sort of cadences mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so. And more typical. I guess it's typical iambic pentameter, right. And then you get this weird, choppy, differently stressed line that runs. That goes much more quickly. So it's like a sudden burst of machine gun fire. And then you're back to the cadences again.

27:03 Wes: Perhaps the idea that the sort of conclusion of the line logically occurs in the following line means that this is like, you know, speeding to overthrow. And then only in the next line do we get that nice cesura that will kind of relax us a little bit. Die, not poor death.

27:21 Erin: Yeah, the whom, the pronoun doesn't get its verb until die. Yeah. So poor death.

27:28 Wes: Poor death. So then we have from rest and sleep, which. But thy pictures be much pleasure. So of course, the only sort of notes I made on that line are the connection to Lady Macbeth. The sleeping and the dead are Buddhist pictures. And then the fact that we get rest and sleep, which sort of subdivided there. I find that interesting, but I don't have anything to say about it.

27:55 Erin: Yeah, I mean, it is always interesting that sleep is very. It's one of my favorite things.

28:01 Wes: So same when I can get it.

28:05 Erin: This speaks to what's terrifying about death, right? Which is loss of consciousness forever. Loss of experience, as I was putting it before. This weird story that we're a part of that terminates and we can't even, you know, we can't even be spectators to the termination or what comes directly after. But which speaks to an element of curiosity, you know, why want more? What is it we have lost? I think. Who is the philosopher who first made this? Epicurus. The argument of Epicurus was that no one could die because at the point of death, right? There is no one. So you can't be injured by death because there's no party anymore to the event. So Wes dies once Wes has died. You speak of Wes being dead in a metaphorical way, but not in a literal way, because the subject, Wes, has disappeared and there's no entity to ascribe the property dead to. So we can't be harmed at that point. Which is a. That's a much more abstract philosophical route to go that evades the strategy of appealing to an afterlife. But although I think the two have weird crossover, which I won't go into now because I can't articulate it or express it, what I'll say is I'll allude to this and this. This is related to discussions on the partial examined life about personal identity. And this question of death. But there's weird paradoxes involved in personal identity and death speak to the impossibility of death, which I can't. I'm not going to be able to give a good explanation of that, so I won't. But. So in other words, the idea of being eternally alive or impossible to extinguish is. It's not just predicated on belief in an afterlife. I'll just say that. So I think there's something deeply ingrained in us which thinks that this termination of experience is in some sense impossible. So I kind of got us off track there on the whole sleep rest thing.

30:09 Wes: I really. I want to put a pin in this Epicurus quote. I really like that because at the end of the episode, if I may, I want to recite something as well from Donne's Meditation 17, which I think will shed some additional light on that or be in conversation with it. Not the famous part of. Pretty much all of Meditation 17 is really famous, but not the most famous part about Ask not for whom the Bell Tolls, but a different part that I really love.

30:35 Erin: So I'd like to pause for a moment to ask you to fill out a survey that will help us to get to know you, your interests, and what you think of the show. Please support the podcast by taking our short questionnaire@surveymonkey.com R Airwave. It only takes a few minutes, and your feedback will help us improve subtext and find new sponsors who actually interest you. There is even a place at the end to tell us anything you want. Plus, as my way of saying thank you, you will be entered to win a $500Amazon gift card. Again, that's surveymonkey.comr airwave, or click on the link in our episode notes. You know, he's pointing to an interesting paradox here about the pleasures of sleep and rest and the fact that. The strangeness of. The fact that we fear cessation of consciousness when we kind of welcome it at various times, and we're also beset with it constantly. There's a lot that goes on, you know, if you think of the limitedness of our stream of consciousness and attention and things that we don't notice and that might fade. You know, the feeling of my. Of the chair against my thigh right now, which. It's an experience when I attend to it. I know it's been there all along and it registered in some sense, but if I hadn't just drawn attention to it, that I would never, you know, that would have gone off to oblivion. Oblivion. And remained in my preconscious or whatever you want to call it. And we have this little. This is kind of a William James thought, but this little spotlight in our stream of consciousness that's very narrowly focused. And we're constantly losing experience to the past as well. So death is a constant, right? It's as experience. Like, what can you say about 10 years ago, about 20 years ago, that is no longer. We can say something about our memories, but only vaguely, right? We can't re. Experience those things. We know that we had such experiences. We might be able to bring back a little bit of it, but only in this very vague way. And then as far as who we were, you know, you reach a certain point in your life, it's like, that was a different person. I'm linked to them in memory, but that person, in a way is gone. So anyway, I'm just trying to think of all these ways in which there is this death in life. The point here, of course, for Donne, is just that let thy pictures be is that we get. You think you're scary. Well, we get. We actually. What you do for us, for the most part, or at least, you know, in your kind of pictures of you that occur within life is actually provide pleasure.

33:09 Wes: So that's great. I'm thinking too, about. I guess I got at that a little bit sort of accidentally in my intro. But this idea that, like, if you have many phases to your life, as I think you and I both have, having different experiences or different sort of reinventions or. I mean, in short, Madonna is the true expert in death. But basically the different types of lives that you might lead may arguably, if I'm understanding you correctly, acquaint somebody like us who's had many different phases and sort of reincarnations, if you will, in our own lives, than someone arguably, who hasn't. You know, not that we're superior in any way, right? But like, that maybe those types of experiences help to demarcate one's life in ways that might be more invisible to someone who, like, stays in the same job and, you know, the way any kind of interminable experience really does seem to last forever, and time has relatively little meaning when one is engaged in something for a long time. Is that. Am I taking that too far?

34:14 Erin: You know. Yeah. I'm thinking of this hypothetical now in which, yes, if we were doing the same thing every day forever, then that remark I made about losing the past would be less true. We would always be reinforcing the same Thing over and over again. I'm thinking now of repetition, compulsion and psychoanalysis, AKA death drive, which is just repetition without progress, stasis, which is possible within life. Not to say that everyone doesn't do a bunch of career changes. Isn't that position really, really. We're talking about growth. We're talking about psychological growth, personal growth, career growth as well. This is another interesting accusation or argument against the power of death that one might make to personify death, which is just that. Look, the engine of progress is the leaving behind of the past, is the death of the past and the death of the former self or the death of certain qualities one once had, right? What if you get over a hang up? If you. If you change as a person therapeutically, you leave some portion of your identity behind. And it's one of the reasons it's so hard to do because that part of you just doesn't want to die. That's scary, right? So even if it's maladaptive and painful, that it'll fight to stay alive within you and it might feel like death to. To try to give it up.

35:32 Wes: So I think those are excellent points. And I'm thinking. I'm thinking about the fact that we get two rests in this poem as well. We get a lot of yoked images, double images, rest and sleep, rest of their bones and soul's delivery. And I'm thinking about that delivery of the soul as being related to what you're saying. And also a little further back to that Epicurus quote as well, that this is just a release into which you become something different. Not to pack too much in here, but I'm also thinking quite a bit about line 7 and this only the good die young kind of reference here, right? Which is a proverb that, whether through Billy Joel or some other means most people have heard of. And I was wondering about the origin of this. This idea that only the good die young or that, you know, good people tend to die first soonest, whatever the case may be. And I found interestingly that it's. There's a section of this in the Greek anthology, which I have, and I looked it up. It originates from a story in Herodotus, history. There's a section I could read from. Okay, so this is gonna be really bad because I don't know how to say any of these names. Like, they're particularly opaque to me. But in the Greek anthology Cleobis, Cleo and Bis and Byton or bitten B I T O N. Wow, these are reaching far back.

36:59 Erin: The neanderthal Greeks in their mythology. Yeah, I'm not familiar with them.

37:04 Wes: They enabled their mother, Cydippe, C Y D I P P E, the priestess of Hera at Argos, to sacrifice by putting their own necks under the yoke when the oxen delayed. You could see this is right out of the Greek anthology. So this is quite a sentence. So they replaced the oxen that Sidope was going to sacrifice.

37:24 Erin: Why did they do that?

37:25 Wes: They were missing. The oxen were missing. So these youths hitched themselves to the cart to carry their mother to the festival for the goddess Hera. They say she was so pleased that she prayed to Hera that the highest human happiness possible for man should befall her sons. Thus she prayed and that night they died. So this idea that like the greatest thing that can happen to you is that you. So I have another source that I found online. Yeah. At the temple, the grateful mother asked Hera to reward her sons with the greatest gift anyone might receive. Whereupon her sons lay down to sleep and never woke again. And so this story, the original proverb, which is whom the gods love dies young. Or you know, something like the best people go first. And so I'm thinking about proverb, you know, tells us that if you're loved by the gods, you die young. And this idea that the story itself contains sleep and the idea that you go to sleep and then you just never wake up, and that this is a blessing by Hera, but also it links sleep and death pretty closely.

38:29 Erin: So only our best men with thee do go. Yeah, I'm trying to think, what is the origins of that thought? I mean, I know that when I was much younger and lost a loved one, I think the feeling was it's kind of a misanthropic thing too. But I being around other people and thinking, well, this person who died was so much better than them.

38:50 Wes: Yep.

38:50 Erin: Why did she die? I guess when you think of someone who has died, there's that element of idealization as well. Once someone is gone, they become the best. Right. They become corporeal. Actual human beings with all their flaws just can't compare to that. So maybe that's. I'm just trying to give an off the cuff psychology of it because I haven't thought about it. Made me curious. And then you might think of, okay, best men with thee do go. I think originally reading the poem the first time, I was thinking of people who go to war. The most valiant, the bravest end up at the front and get killed. And the people who are in a leading Role and taking the most risks in whatever context. It doesn't even have to be war, but. And then blessed in a way. Best and blessed, but in the sense of luckiest. Right. So maybe there's that connotation as well, which I think you were getting at, which is just that it's our best and also our luckiest to go with you because they get to rest. Although it's a strange way of putting it. Rest of their bones, since there's a potential double entendre there. And then Sol's delivery, which just turns death into a courier. Now,

40:00 Wes: I know all I could think of. Doordash. Yeah.

40:03 Erin: Death in little brown shorts carrying a package with a soul in it. So death has now become a link between two worlds, between this world and another, where the best people are and continue on.

40:20 Wes: Yeah. I'm thinking, too, that there's something inherent in the original story from Herodotus about these two boys, that they were willing to carry their mother to the sacrifice and they were willing to debase themselves, in a manner of speaking. Right. By putting themselves in the position of the oxen, the beasts of burden. Obviously, that has, say, Donne, who probably was very familiar with these classical pieces and coming out of a Christian tradition, of course, that would have a lot of Christian resonance. And so I'm wondering about that. The Christological implications of this idea, which, of course are kind of inherent through the whole poem. And, you know, the end we get the sort of transposition of 1 Corinthians. This idea that death is a portal, that it affects a transformation which is ultimately triumphant, I think is obviously inherent in the, say, the genealogy of this poem from both the Judeo Christian and the sort of Greco Roman side here. So in the following line, death then becomes a slave, and it's a slave to the master in this equation are further sort of personified things. And then actual men, kings and desperate men, fate and chance are clear to me. Kings are to a certain extent, clear to me as well. Desperate men is really interesting. Yeah.

41:42 Erin: Well, I was thinking of murder and. Right.

41:45 Wes: But also suicide, in which case desperate men would be slaves to themselves, which is really fascinating.

41:52 Erin: I like this idea that in a way, it's like a kind of Platonic question about abstraction versus or universal versus particular. Right. Death is instantiated in the doings of human beings. Only can be what it is through those doings. Whether it's, you know, it could be people killing each other. Could be chance. Could be just falling down in the shower, getting a disease. It could be, you know, Microscopic organisms or just old age. But. So maybe human doings is going a bit too far in that sense. But it's, you know, the worldly, worldly doings. It's not Hades or it's not death's world which controls all these things. Again, that's just the receiver. The kind of death that sort of picks up the garbage. Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it. The effect death receives, the effects of things that actually happen in life. And all the power is in life. You know, if someone's killing or even killing themselves. The agency is a. Of a living person doing things within life. And it's not something that death is doing. And in fact, death is slave to it all in the sense that there would be no undying if these things weren't. Death would not have any work to do, any garbage to pick up if all this stuff weren't happening. So we get the idea, you know, when the world finally ends and there's no more dying to be done than death, you know, as per the last part of the line of this, death will also die.

43:20 Wes: I like that garbage idea, too, because we have this littering at this point of the poem with lists. You know, stuff just starts to really pile up like bones. So we get this list there of four things. And then in the following line, line 10, we hear who Death also, like, hangs out with. Poison, war and sickness. In fact, they're his. He doesn't just hang out with them, they're his roommates. And that, I think, is pretty straightforward to me. But in line 11, we get what I. Again, I don't know if I'm overreading or if I'm just, like, staring at this piece of paper for too long. We get. And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well and better than thy stroke in the following line. But we get. For me, I feel like there's a little bit of reflection of line 10 into line 11 sonically, if not in terms of meaning. But maybe there's something we can make out of this meaning. So we get poison in 10 and poppy in 11. And then we get the most tangential connection, war and charms. Which I think there's something in there. And then we get sickness, dwell and sleep as well. So poison and poppy, war and charms. I think that's not just in my imagination, right?

44:32 Erin: No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, that seems right.

44:36 Wes: And then sickness and sleep. So I'm interested in, you know, if this makes sense in sort of reading the collection of former items on the list with the latter items, I mean,

44:47 Erin: we go from poison to poppies. I mean, if you think about what's happening with poppies or charms and the. The effect that they have, sleep, this is all. Again, it doesn't transcend the framework of life. It all happens within life. And the power lies with the poppies. And then the. The effect is sleep. But death is not the agency in poison. Again, death is the receiver, so to speak. The agency is still, you know, poison or war or sickness. And death dwells with them in the sense of. But if he's the roommate, he's the moocher, he's living off of their labors.

45:28 Wes: He's Kramer. I like it.

45:31 Erin: That's right. Bursting into the apartment and getting the cereal out. So the counterpart there is sleep, but death sleep. Both effects of something and those things that create the effects of the powerful things. And so there's no reason for either sleep or death to be proud. But the distinction is that the idea of dwelling with those things with death is a very passive. And it is that way only because, again, death is an abstraction that transcends the frame. And sleep happens within the frame. Right. Sleep is a real thing that creatures do on an ongoing basis. And dying is a process and activity of the being. Dead, unlike being asleep, is not itself a ongoing process and an activity. It's the termination of all of that. Again, so it lies outside of the frame in this very confusing and paradoxical way. So I think this turns the paradoxical nature of death against itself. And that's why I was referencing Epicurus. It's much more clever than just an appeal to an afterlife. It uses the inconceivability of death in a way against. Against itself.

46:40 Wes: So this latest comment that you've made is littered with Princess Bride references. I just have to say, I mean, and inconceivable is really the inconceivable, the cherry on top of the sundae. Because I'm like, of course. Right? I mean, death is a binary state. You can't be only mostly dead, right? Yeah.

47:00 Erin: Oh, God, that's so funny. Yeah, I'm just being that guy. You really are thinking I was being clever.

47:09 Wes: No, no, not at all. Well, that's a combination of Billy Crystal's character and Wallace Shawn's character right there. The two, arguably the two best characters in the film. Not forgetting Carol Kane as Billy Crystal's wife. But anyway, yeah, so we have. And better than thy stroke, which I like there for that, obviously, for that double meaning, we have the stroke of the bell, the Bell tolling in the middle of that line. But also, I suppose, an ax falling.

47:34 Erin: Yeah.

47:35 Wes: Or sword separation of having a stroke.

47:39 Erin: Just kidding.

47:42 Wes: The separation there, I think. Like that stroke, when that stroke falls in the middle of that line. Arguably, that is the moment when death truly dies. Rhetorically in the poem, perhaps.

47:52 Erin: Well, I'm thinking of the scythe there as well. Right. So if you think of death personified and the reaping, the. The act of reaping, so. And so they make us sleep better. There's this again. There's this comparison between sleep and death and the idea that sleep is better, but also that, well, is there. They're more effective. That's interesting, actually. It's like saying the poppies have a power and effectiveness that your stroke doesn't or isn't. You see what I'm getting at here?

48:21 Wes: Yeah.

48:21 Erin: It's a little bit confusing. Is it the sleep that's better or the agency of the things causing sleep or death?

48:29 Wes: I think ultimately the grammatical antecedent would be sleep, but.

48:33 Erin: Yeah. So a better sleep. Right, of course. I mean, this is like the clear reading, which is just to say, look, you're not the only one who can make people sleep. But there's a kind of sleep which is better. Doesn't quite fit with the idea of waking eternally. I mean. Right. In a way, death should be the better sleep from a religious standpoint.

48:58 Wes: But my reading in line 12 is that the word stroke and that semicolon there, that in fact kills death in that moment. Death personified in that moment. And then the second half of the line is actually the swelling of the now dead corpse. So this is the killing of death himself or the person that death has killed. And then we get this communal.

49:22 Erin: So it would mean. On one reading, it would just mean pride. Why swallowest thou, then? Why are you proud? But then on. I see on your reading, it's also.

49:29 Wes: Sorry, I'm skipping ahead to the vague secondary reading.

49:33 Erin: The other meaning would be swelling corpse. Interesting. I didn't think of that.

49:38 Wes: Yeah. So, you know, the death is murdered. And now it's, you know, before, at the beginning, when we were talking about death being proud and swelling. Right. It's always sort of being replaced by. Imagistically, it's being evacuated and replaced by the actual human body that it affects. Whereas here, arguably, there's a sort of like triple meaning, because I think swelling recalls death being proud, of course, and the human corpse. Right. But it also. Perhaps this is the moment where death itself dies and death becomes a Corpse, a swelling body. And then in the following couplet, we get the pronoun we, the collective pronoun. So it's almost like maybe I'm, like, really taking this too far. I don't know. Or maybe there's a reading like this out there somewhere. But the last two, it's almost this effort for a chorus of mourning. Right. One short sleep passed. We wake eternally. So then it becomes a matter of, instead of individuation, killing me or death itself, death as a guy, as a singular person, death is killed. And then we all collectively wake eternally. And then death becomes. There's still that individuation of personification that occurs in the very last line of the poem, but also the larger concept of death. Right. So there's a kind of move toward the collective, in other words, in these last two lines of the poem, in which death writ large shall be no more. And that D is not capitalized. Right?

51:10 Erin: Yeah, that's important. I think what's being evoked here. Right. Is the resurrection. Right. And the end of the world. What is that called? Armageddon.

51:25 Wes: Sure.

51:26 Erin: What is the part?

51:26 Wes: I just know it involves Bruce Willis. Revelation.

51:29 Erin: Revelation. Thank you. Yeah. Thinking of an asteroid or whatever it is.

51:36 Wes: No, that's what killed the dinosaurs.

51:40 Erin: Yeah. So the end of the world. Revelation. And so there's some point where we're no longer just talking about individual human beings anymore, but humanity as a whole and maybe biology as a whole. Right. All living things. And the end of time, maybe, per se as well. So even matter. And at that point, there's no more small D death, individual dying to be done by. By individuals. And so capital D, death has nothing more to do. Right. It's a slave to all of those happenings. It's a slave to what happens within that framework of the world. And when all that stops, death dies. So getting at this dependency of the personified death on everything that's happening within existence, being life, whatever you want to call it.

52:30 Wes: And I like the fact that short sleep replaces death there. So really death isn't even really death. Like, you know, not only does it die, but it's not even really itself. I think at this point, it's totally lost any kind of power, even in its own meaning. It's just replaced by sleep. And then I, like earlier you said it results in an eternal waking. You use that phrase. And I think that sounds to me like way more terrifying than death itself.

52:58 Erin: Yeah.

52:58 Wes: As someone who's also an insomniac, you

53:01 Erin: know, how are you Gonna pass all that time in heaven. That's the problem.

53:04 Wes: Right, right. Well, yeah, and we've talked about this before, about the eternal being terrifying inherently. But, yeah, just the fact that in the end, again, it sort of transformed into something which is not death and then not itself. Kind of the opposite of death and then death itself, which is, of course, as I mentioned before, a reference to 1 Corinthians. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death as the enemy. In that line, too, actually shed some interesting light on those earlier lines as well.

53:38 Erin: Very good.

53:40 Wes: Yeah. So in relation to Sonnet 10, I was also thinking a bit, as I said before, about meditation 17 from devotions on emergent occasions. And as I said, you know, the whole thing is really famous, but this one part is my favorite part. And I've also kind of memorized this part as well. So not the for whom the bell Tolls part, or even the no man is an island part. This just like. Amazing. Meditation 17 is amazing. It's like an album with only number one tracks. All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language. And every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand is in every translation. And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. I was thinking about this. Now you'll see why. I was thinking about this when you mentioned the Epicurus idea here, where, again, death is sort of displaced as he is in Sonnet 10, you know, God as this great author of man who's merely employing these tools of translation. And these tools are not death itself per se, but they're these synonymous actors, you know, acting on behalf of death, or like what we call the. You know, the roommates of death before these individual causes. Age, sickness, war and justice. So he even includes this sort of criminality, you know, sort of capital punishment element here as well, which is really interesting. But I just think it's beautiful. I love this part of meditation 17 even more than I love Death Be Not Proud, which I really love, just because of this idea of all of God's work as being a great library, I think is fabulous.

55:46 Erin: Yeah, this idea of translation is really interesting as a way of thinking about what happens. Translation into a better language.

55:55 Wes: That's right. I love this idea, ultimately, that death is just translation. And I think just as someone whose greatest wish for many years is just like read Tolstoy in the original Russian. I love this idea of the afterlife, not as this eternality that we've been talking about, but as a great library in which you can read everything in the best possible language. That's really wonderful.

56:18 Erin: Yes. Once again, please support the podcast by taking our short listener questionnaire@surveymonkey.com or click on the link in the episode notes.

56:31 Wes: Okay, well, I think we're gonna move to Postscript now. I know we are going to talk about tar, the great Tar. Tar on Tar. We've both seen the film and we wanted to have a little bit of a informal chit chat about that movie. Doesn't have a lot to do with Dunn, but next time we will be back with more Dunn poems or a poem. We haven't decided yet, but we'll have a part two coming up soon.

56:57 Erin: Great.

56:57 Wes: All right. Thank you, thank you.

57:00 Erin: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. subscribe@patreon.com subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. airwavemedia.com once again, please support the podcast by taking our short Listener questionnaire@surveymonkey.com Airwave or click on the link in the episode notes.