A Sonnet Analysis Of Death Be Not Proud Essay Examples

Death be not Proud is a sonnet that expresses the speaker’s defiant attitude about death. In the sonnet, the speaker personifies death and tells him that he must not be proud. Many people see death as ‘mighty’ and something that must be feared by men. As the speaker in the sonnet stated, “Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”. These two lines illustrate the speaker’s intended message as well as the general idea of the sonnet.
An analysis of the sonnet proves that it follows the pattern of an Italian sonnet, wherein the first six lines addresses the main issue. In Death be not Proud, the speaker discusses the issue at length in the first six lines. Hence, the speaker directly communicates his intended message to Death and the readers. For this reason, the reader immediately understands the speaker’s message because he explicitly states it in the first six lines. In this way, Death be not Proud is organized such that the author expresses his feelings not only towards death but also towards life and the subject of the sonnet, as in the individual mentioned in the second stanza.
The sonnet contains a few clusters of rhyming but these do not directly support the hypothesis, particularly the speaker’s intended message. The clusters of rhymes, such as “scope” and “hope”, “despising” and “arising”, and “state” and “gate”, among others do not directly and explicitly communicate the theme of the poem. Nonetheless, some parts of the clusters such as “kill me” and “die” match the theme of the sonnet, which is death. Furthermore, the other clusters in the second stanza are illustrative of the speaker’s feelings towards the subject of his affections.