Death's Duell Literary Elements

Sermon

It was delivered on 25 February 1631 in St. Paul's Cathedral.

The sermon is narrated in first-person plural.

Bleak, Elegiac, Mournful, Hopeful

The protagonist is John Donne and the antagonist is death.

Donne is addressing the act of confronting death in the physical form and reconciling either the judgment or redemption of the afterlife. He references God’s salvation in death through the resurrection of Jesus Christ allowing for our spiritual rebirth.

The climax occurs when Donne describes the decaying and putrefaction of the physical body.

The opening line on the architecture of buildings foreshadows the support of God in delivering us even in death.

N/A

Donne alludes to the resurrection of Jesus Christ to speak on salvation and redemption.

“But they lie down alike in the dust, and the worm covers them.[370] In Job and in Isaiah,[371] it covers them and is spread under them, the worm is spread under thee, and the worm covers thee. There are the mats and the carpets that lie under, and there are the state and the canopy that hang over the greatest of the sons of men. Even those bodies that were the temples of the Holy Ghost come to this dilapidation, to ruin, to rubbish, to dust”

“In all our periods and transitions in this life, are so many passages from death to death; our very birth and entrance into this life is exitus à morte, an issue from death, for in our mother's womb we are dead”

“In all these three lines, then, we shall look upon these words, first, as the God of power, the Almighty Father rescues his servants from the jaws of death; and then as the God of mercy, the glorious Son rescued us by taking upon himself this issue of death; and then, between these two, as the God of comfort, the Holy Ghost rescues us from all discomfort by his blessed impressions”

“That word which the Holy Ghost, by Moses, useth for the ark, is common to all kind of boats”

Donne personifies death throughout the sermon.