Figurative Language In Death Be Not Proud By John Donne

The poem “Death, Be Not Proud”, by John Donne, is a Petrarchan sonnet, which is divided to an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the last six lines). In the octave we are exposed to the speaker who seems to be a simple man who does not like Death (maybe from a personal experience, but we cannot know for sure), and probably religious. We can assume he is religious by the belief of “soul’s delivery” (8) and eternal life after death, as stated in line 13. The speaker addresses Death, and throughout the whole poem he tries to diminish and insult Death by using different kinds of figurative language, imagery, motives, repetitions, diction and other elements. The first, and probably most important element that can be noticed right in the beginning is the personification of Death. The speaker addresses Death and talks to him as if he were a human being. The personification can be seen throughout the whole poem in different ways. First, it is the fact that the speaker starts with talking to Death, whereas Death is not really someone we can talk to or address. Second, each time in which the speaker …show more content…
Vincent Millay. In this poem the speaker is a lonely person who cannot remember his or her past loves. The tone throughout the whole poem is sad and gloomy. We can notice that by the diction with the use of unhappy words such as “ghosts” (4), “pain” (6), “cry” (8) and “lonely” (9). Moreover, in the octave it seems that the speaker uses depictions that involves all of our senses in order to demonstrate the loneliness. We can imagine the touch of “lips have kissed” (1) and “arms have lain” (2); there is a use of the sight sense in the “rain / is full of ghosts tonight” (3-4), as well as hearing of “tap and sigh / upon the glass” (4-5). Thus, the speaker emphasizes that loneliness and miserable surround her or him all over and can be felt in many different