Thoughts on Donne's "Death's Duell"

Donne’s final sermon, “Death’s Duell” really is a tour de force in Donne’s preaching. This sermon was an Ash Wednesday sermon which he preached while very ill, shortly before he died. The sermon was published soon after, with an engraving portrait of Donne in his shroud, a portrait which he commissioned and sat for before his death. People who heard Donne preach this sermon commented that he was preaching his own funeral sermon. Cheerful.

I wish I had time to read a lot of Donne’s sermons so that I could better compare this, his last sermon, with how he approaches his other sermons to see what differences become apparent in Donne’s preaching as he comes near the end of his life, but the only other sermon I have read and can compare this to is the Easter sermon in which he uses the extended theatre metaphor. McCullough (whose chapter, “Donne as preacher,” I discussed in an earlier post) claims that this sermon, since it is so near to Donne’s death is one that is more free from artifice and theatricality, and which honestly and convincingly makes an argument about God’s rule over all things, including death.

McCullough’s chapter about Donne’s preaching also urged the reader to remember that the sermon was meant to be heard, not read, and to thus use one’s imagination to try to picture how Donne might have used tone, volume, and gestures to emphasize his point. I tried to keep this in mind while reading this rather lengthy sermon, and it helped me what seemed at first like a fairly dry text come to life a little more. It’s interesting to see where Donne is using repetition and other devices that would work especially well with an audience who is hearing, rather than reading his words.

The text of the sermon is brilliant, though it’s hard to articulate a main idea, because of the way that Donne shifts his argument as he progresses through the sermon. It’s a fascinating argument to follow though. He starts by making the argument that all our lives we are really only moving from death to death. He then moves in on a meditation on the fact that Christ, God incarnate died and was raised again, both of which seem impossible. Donne contends that Christ was able to do both of these things not because of his hypostatic union, but because “unto God belong the issues of death” (1). Near the end of the sermon, however, he has shifted his argument so that he says that we are moving from life in the present to life eternal. He uses the interesting metaphor of a sentence with a parenthetical, saying, “As the first part of a sentence peeces well with the last, and never repeats, never hearkens after the parenthesis that comes betweene, so doth a good life here flowe into an Eternall life, without anf consideration, what manner of death we dye” (21). He comments on the seeming paradox of Christ’s death, saying, “That God this Lord, the Lord of life could dye, is a strange contemplation” (22). His sermon then gives a lengthy narration of Christ’s passion, seemingly to affirm that Christ really did die, showing that God has power over death. He ends his sermon with a comment that I thing is absolutely beautiful: “as God breathed a soule into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soule int God, into the hands of God” (32).

This sermon is awesome. And I think that exploring the way that Donne weaves death and life together in his arguments will help me as I continue to try to understand what Donne is getting at with his near-constant use of paradoxes.