Most poems about death plead, mourn, or bargain. John Donne's Holy Sonnet X does something stranger: it taunts death to its face. "Death, be not proud," it begins — and never lets up.
An argument, not a lament
Donne treats death as an over-rated bully. Death doesn't even do its own work, he argues — it's a "slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men," and it keeps low company with poison, war and sickness. Worse, a little poppy or a charm can put us to sleep just as well. So why the swagger? The sonnet ends with the most audacious line in English devotional poetry: Death, thou shalt die. In the Christian scheme Donne believed, death is the one thing that death cannot survive.
The shroud portrait
Donne meant it personally. In his final illness, as Dean of St Paul's, he is said to have preached his own funeral sermon — and he posed for a portrait wrapped in his burial shroud, which he kept by his bed as he died. The man who told death not to be proud rehearsed his own on purpose.
Wear it
Our Death Be Not Proud tee carries the opening line with an hourglass motif and the complete sonnet on the back.