. It is more of a peace and tranquility that Donne offers here; a welcomed rest at our life's end. Contextually speaking, there is more to life after death and it should not be feared, but rather embraced.The next perception about death comes in the third quatrainthe image of death as vile accompaniment to evil forces in life: "Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,/ And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell." However, here he does not try to change the traditional pairing of death with evil. Instead, he uses that perception to further demonstrate Death. Donne makes associations with the most loathsome effects and casts him in their same light to burst his ego. The poet even notes that narcotics or witchcraft ("poppies or charms") can outdo death in making people sleep, since drug-inducing trances or hexes are not as permanent as death. Therefore, how much power does Death actually have if there are many things in this world that can produce its same effects. The superiority of these human-based modes of death takes away the last shred of dignity for death: "Why swell'st thou then?" Donne's confident reliance is based on the victory of Christ over Death through the Resurrection: "One Short sleep past, we wake eternally,/ And death shalt be no more. Death, thou shalt die." He offers a natural and desirable end to life and its experiences, adding to the Christian idea that death is the avenue to eternal salvation. The final insult preserves the Christian belief in everlasting life while denying death the continuance of his own life. The verbal effects that Donne performs in this sonnet cannot disguise the fact that as a Christian he must entertain these two ideas of death: death as rescuer, and death as evil demon. The contextualist sees that in the end, all that he can do in order to deal with the enormity of death is to turn the sting of death against death itself. It is his way of making death conc...
