As resolutely canonical as they seem to us now, the “Holy Sonnets” of John Donne (1572–1631) flicker with some uncertainty in the imaginary museum hall of English literature. We think we know them. Without even trying, we can quote famous first and last lines, if not entire poems: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you . . . um, blah blah blah . . . nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Yet beyond those famous lines, which spring to mind with such inevitability that it’s hard to imagine their ever not having existed in the English canon, what do we actually know about the poems?

As it turns out, we know less than we think we do. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that much of what we know for sure is that we don’t know that much. We know that the “Holy Sonnets” didn’t appear as a published whole until after Donne’s death. We hypothesize that Donne must circulated these poems privately but extensively among friends during the years of his transition from Catholicism to Anglicanism.

Some poems exist in as many as fifteen manuscript copies in Donne’s hand. Izaak Walton (1593–1683), Donne’s first biographer, claimed that the sonnet cycled had originated in 1615, the year that Donne, with some reluctance, took up Anglican orders. But this too is only theory. How many sonnets there might originally have been, nobody knows. Of the nineteen that did finally constitute the published sequence, there are variations among the earliest printed editions. In some editions, certain poems are omitted, others included: nineteen sonnets, but not always the same nineteen, presented in the same order.

What we think of as inevitable, entrenched, and immovable, then, is not — like death itself, as today’s selection from the “Holy Sonnets” asserts.  In this variation on the Petrarchan sonnet, with an abbaabbacddcee rhyme scheme, death is not the eternal nightfall it flatters itself that it is, but only a brief nap before the dawn of an everlasting day.

Meanwhile, having whetted their appetites on “Death Be Not Proud,” Sun readers might like to revisit other Donne poems which have appeared previously in this space: “I Am a Little World Made Cunningly,” “Air and Angels,” and the great “Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward.” 

Death Be Not Proud
by John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st 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 soul’s 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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.