Wit and "Death, Be Not Proud"

The movie Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, illustrates the meaning of John Donne’s poem “Death, Be Not Proud” by making the audience feel and somewhat experience the transition from the common notion of “Death” being something “mighty and dreadful” to something that can be conquered.

Vivian Bearing, the protagonist, lives her whole life immersed as a scholar in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. However, when she finds that she has stage four ovarian cancer, not even the words of Donne, to which she has been passionately devoted, can help alleviate the fear she feels in knowing that death is just around the corner. During her sickness, she continuously recites Donne’s “Death, Be Not Proud”, hoping that John Donne’s fearlessness of death would somehow be passed on to her and give her solace. However, the more she suffers, the more she could not grasp the poem’s meaning. Her agony is powerfully portrayed in the movie such as in the scene where she curls up on the side of her bed and helplessly and desperately cries for any kind of rescue, from her torment, from death. In scenes such as this, we, the audience, easily understands why she is scared. We can relate to her fear of dying. Death, after all, as Donne says, typically thought of as a dark and fearsome force that is in no way surmountable. How then can Donne just illustrate death as something so insignificant when dying, as portrayed by Vivian, seems such a long and tormenting process?

As Vivian gets closer and closer to the face of death, we too slowly realize what Donne’s message is in “Death, Be Not Proud”. In Donne’s poem, he describes death as something so trivial because he separates death from the agonizing road that leads to death. Death is not the dreadful ovarian cancer that tortures Vivian. It simply is the point, the split second in which the body and soul “unjoints”, the “minute’s latest point” (Holy Sonnet VI) in Vivian’s life. Vivian’s sickness, her cancer, is what causes death. Death, in Donne’s poem, does not involve the long suffering that Vivian experiences just before. It is just “one short sleep past”, painless and powerless, contrary to what we all believe. At the end of the movie, instead of something so frightful, we may even see death as something positive, as it is a gateway for Vivian to escape her agony into a new and eternal life.

Before watching the movie, many people are not able to understand Donne’s ideology about death. By watching Vivian’s story, by watching someone’s battle with death and someone’s with Donne’s poem itself, we start to understand how Donne, who found himself in a similar situation with another sickness, is able to view death as something that is not worth the fear.

What is poetry?

"It is the light at the end of the tunnel and the darkness within it.
It is the morning dove mourning love, and nothing cries out like the cry of the heart.
It is a lamp of the imagination lighting up every darkness.
It is made with the syllables of dreams in unwritten dictionaries.
It is far far cries upon a beach at nightfall.
A poem can be made of common household ingredients: it fits on a single page
yet it can fill a world, and fits in the pocket of a heart.
Poetry is a rope to tie around you.
It speaks the unspeakable, utters the inutterable sigh of the heart.
Each poem a momentary madness, and the unreal is realist.
A poem should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown.
Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained."

What is poetry? Poetry expresses everything there is for the heart to express: joy, sadness, hope, darkness, love, hate, etc. It is a play of words that leads us to imagination, enabling us to light up and explore every darkness there is in our lives. Poetry, unlike novels and plays and other written pieces, are expressed in much shorter length, forcing the poets to think deeper and put as much meaning as possible in such little syllables. This is the reason why I think poetries are deeper than other pieces of literature. They seem to have boundaries on the amount of words, and yet because of these boundaries, they hold so much more depth. Every word, every punctuation, every line, every structure holds meaning. It gives much more material to unravel, so much to drown yourself in. In my opinion this depth is what makes poetry a much more effective way to reach out to people and express “cries of the heart”. They are made up of so little and yet they contain so much as shown in “it fits on a single page yet it can fill a world, and fits in the pocket of a heart”.