Part one of term paper
The seventeenth-century poet John Donne has gone down in the history of popular culture for three lines: “No man is an island,” “Ask not for whom the bell tolls -- it tolls for thee”, and the opening of a poem called “Death be not proud”. This last came from a collection of Donne’s poems which came to be called the “Holy Sonn ...

Part two of term paper
... own mortality, as well as the relationship between God and himself. This paper will take a look at two of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and determine how his emotional states affected his opinions about the nature of Death. According to Ian Ousby, writing in the Wordsworth Companion to English Literature, “Much of Donne’s poetry confronted the theme of death. In his Holy Sonnets, mostly written before he was ordained, there is the memorable poem beginning “Death be not proud” and he was also ...