Talking to Death

In “The Eclipse,” the speaker directly addresses God, using apostrophe to animate Death itself. The speaker’s warning that Death has been conquered by God (specifically, as the last stanza specifies, through Christ’s blood sacrifice) echoes John Donne, “Holy Sonnet X”:

John Donne, Holy Sonnet X

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Source: luminarium.org

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats famously eroticizes the figure of Death, as he says to the singing bird:

John Keats,
Ode to a Nightingale

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

Source: poetryfoundation.org

In many poems, Pulter welcomes death so that she can be released into the eternal world. In The Hope65 Pulter both apostrophizes and eroticizes Death:

Hester Pulter, The Hope

Dear Death, dissolve these mortal charms,
And then I’ll throw myself into thy arms;
Then thou may’st use my carcass as thou lust,
Until my bones (and little luz) be dust: