Death be not Proud

In death be not proud we see excellent uses of cataloging and diction to show the mocking of death, and to belittle his power and reasons to fear him. The speaker in this poem, who may be john Donne and who may not be John Donne, we can never really tell, uses diction to bring top light reasons to not fear death, and to show death as less of a powerful being, and more of a weak servant. then later we see uses of cataloging to reinforce this theme of mockery towards death as told by the speaker.
Diction is used to mock death in many instances. First of all we see the uses of rest and sleep as the pictures and instruments of death. this is because when we see dead people, they look peaceful and almost as if they are sleeping. This takes the fear out of death as sleep is a happy and wonderful thing that i personally look forward to, and if sleep is an instrument of death, how can we fear it? Then later down towards the end of the peom, we see that we have but one short sleep and then we wake enternally. this means that we die only briefly and are then born into heaven and all its glory, or something along those lines, as John Donne was christian. this takes even more fear and stigma away from death as he take us to heaven, and how can anything that takes us to such a fabled, beautiful place be scary or bad?
Catalouging is used to destroy the power that death lords over us. This is done in the middle of the peom with the line "thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men". this line clearly says that death is a slave, and because he is a slave to the action of kings and desperate men, key word desperate, and forces such as fate and chance, how can he have any real power. Death makes nothing happen, he only reactes to what has been done, thus he is merely the bus boy of life. The next instance of catalouging is seen in the very next line where death is said to dwell with poison, war and sickness. As he is among poison war and sickness, he is not among good company, and has a horrible existence, thus he has no power, and in fact is pitied by the reader.
I personally really like death be not proud as it was pretty straight forward and although it was still a peom, i wasnt totally lost in the language, which in most of Donne's poems holds me back from the understanding them. I personally theorize that the speaker could actually mocking death, or he could be trying to belittle death for his own sake as he actually fears death and is reassuring himself and trying to improve his own confidence.

The Good Morrow

John Donne's The Good Morrow uses wonderful diction, word choice, to highlight the he was just drifting through life until he met his true love. We see this play out in all three stanzas, and overall it creates the tone of being lost and walking with a blindfold until love open his eyes to the world. This word choice leads to the eventual poetic voice which he uses to show his desire for love, and how his life really inst a life until he has met his love.
The Good Morrow narrates Donne's feelings towards love, and of love for his significant other. I personally think that it does so in a very round about way that befuddles the reader, but that is just my personal opinion. Diction plays a very large part in The Good Morrow, and it creates the overall meaning of the poem like pieces of a puzzle. In the first stanza we see hsi diction showing the meaninglessness of his life until he found love with " i wonder, by my troth, what thou and i did, till we loved?" he is wondering what his life consisted of and what meaning his life had before he found his love, showing that life without love is not life at all. Another instance in the first stanza of diction reinforcing the theme of this poem is near the bottom when he says that any beauty he saw prior to his love was just a dream of her, his lover.
The second stanza further underlines the theme of being lost when with out love with all the references to discoveries and maps. He discovered what life was like when he discovered love. the sentence "let maps to others, world on worlds have shown..." this says that he discovered a true life, a new world, with the help of a map, and that without that map he had nos sense of direction.
Finally, in the third stanza, the references to the hemispheres further brings to light how he was not complete and his life had no meaning without love. He was one hemisphere and his lover, his partner, was the other hemisphere, creating a complete, new world.
The Good Morrow speaks to Donne's romantic side, and also his philosophical nature. This unravels to the reader through the diction of the poem, which illuminates that in life we are ever moving, ever discovering, but we only begin to understand and respect the gift of life when we are given the gift of love. Donne has received love, and as such he has seen the difference between a life with and without love.