John Donne (born January 22, 1572 – died March 31, 1631) shifted dramatically in his life: The early Donne was the passionate lover and rebel of sense; the later Donne, a man consumed with his own spiritual journey and search for truth.
Donne is known as the first and greatest of metaphysical poets—those of a genre in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions,” as essayist and critic Samuel Johnson put it.
Here, Donne has taken a Romantic form and transformed a transcendental struggle of life and death into a quiet ending, one in which death “shall be no more.”
Where Johnson spied cumbersome force, Donne’s style dazzles with soft and calm brilliance, even in the cascade of calumnies against the great “equalizer” Death. “Fate, chance, kings and desperate men” are yoked together, not in bondage but in freedom, in their power to inflict and manipulate death at will. The panorama of life and legacy has overcome death time and again, yet Donne expounds the expansive exploitation of death in one verse.