Death, Be Not Proud by John Donne (Poem #5)

I personally liked this poem and what I thought it was trying to say. Overall, the narrator is talking about death as a whole, and saying that it is not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. The narrator is talking about death as if it were a person, and saying that although people have thought death is scary, and dreadful that it is not any of that at all, so death should not be proud of it’s wrath. Death is similar to sleeping, so it should not be something people fear because everyone is familiar with sleep. I think it is saying that death does not kill us, but life does. At the end of the poem, the narrator is saying that one will sleep, and wake up eternally (when a person dies), and when people realize this, then the idea of death will die, and that ideology will not be existent. Once people think of death as not being so powerful, then death will not be as scary as ‘war, poison, and sickness’ as the narrator mentions in the poem, most likely to show contrast on how much more worse poison, sickness, and war are than death is. I liked that the narrator mentioned this because it proves a good point. The theme is that sometimes we make things more worse than they are just by over thinking it, instead of trying to make things like death easier to think about, deal with, and cope with.