Death is a theme that has been explored by many poets. Death is inevitable and is one certainty of human existence. What does death mean? What does one feel when one dies? Is there a life after death? Do we have eternal souls? These questions have long plagued us. Poets explore these different questions and attempt to answer them by the realms of their imagination. Personification of death is an approach often taken by poets to make this abstract notion of death more understandable and immediate. Death has been personified in John Donne’s Sonnet 10 (Death Be Not Proud), Margaret Cavendish’s Natures Cook and Emily Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop For Death. Personification of death is a strong tool, which can be used to create certain imagery, which then affects the reader in a particular way. The gender of the personification and characteristics portrayed of the persona play a critical role in development of the poem’s tone and reader’s experience of the poem.

“Personification is a figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human.” (Baldick 190) In the poem Sonnet 10 by John Donne, death is refer

The gender of the personification is an extremely significant tool for characterizing the personas portrayed in the poems. Donne in Sonnet 10 refers to death as “thou”, “thee” and “thy” (Donne 45). These are second person singular pronouns used to address death. A specific gender has not been assigned to death. It is referred to in a neutral way. This leaves the poet with the flexibility of assigning various characteristics to it. It is not bounded in gender norms. The poet uses various adjectives to characterize death. Strong adjectives like “Proud”, “mighty”, and “dreadful” are juxtaposed with weaker comparisons like “slave”, “sleep” and “rest” (Donne 45). These strong juxtapositions in depiction of death lead the reader to clearly distinguish the concepts of what-is and what was believed to be about death. The poet depicts death as - “…slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men” (Donne 45). He creates an opposition to the then held belief that death was something that was “Mighty and dreadful...” (Donne 45). Donne strongly propagates the idea of life after death and clearly depicts death as not something that is to be feared. The passage of poem is a slow transgression from describing death as something larger than life to something more human like. This effect has been achieved by subtle use of personification, which is not strongly gender-bound.

The characteristics of the persona are then bound in the used stereotype to add impact to the poem. The result is the desired tone and effect on the reader. John Donne convinces the reader that “One short sleep past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death thou shalt die.” (Donne 45) Similarly, Emily Dickinson positively renders the serene calmness of death and concludes that the carriage ride with death “ Were toward Eternity -” (Dickinson 322). And in sharp contrast, Cavendish leaves us with an image of a dead human body that is “Then powdered up with phlegm, and rheum that’s salt” (Cavendish 87). The poets connect the personified death to various characteristics of the persona and render a singular tone to the poem, which enriches the reading experience

Some topics in this essay:
Emily Dickinson, Natures Cook, Donne Sonnet, Stop Death, , Fate Chance, Death Personification, John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, tone poem, donne 45, personification death, natures cook, sonnet 10, stop death, poem stop death, cavendish 87, feminine gender, masculine gender, poem stop, poem natures cook, Donne’s Sonnet, death emily dickinson, characteristics bounded gender, eternity tone poem,