The Good Death
by Helen Smith
John Donne’s “Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness” meditates upon the speaker’s illness, and imagines the microcosm of his body as a map of the newly-expanded world. In contemplating his own death, Donne’s speaker finds solace in the promise of Christ’s resurrection, a figure for the sinner’s own restoration under God at the final judgement.
Hym to God, My God, in my Sickness
- Since I am coming to that Holy room,
- Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
- I shall be made Thy music; as I come
- I tune the instrument here at the door,
- And what I must do then, think here before;
- Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
- Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
- Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
- That this is my south-west discovery,
- Per fretum febris, by these straits to die;
- I joy, that in these straits I see my west;
- For, though those currents yield return to none,
- What shall my west hurt me? As west and east
- In all flat maps—and I am one—are one,
- So death doth touch the resurrection.
- Is the Pacific sea my home? Or are
- The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
- Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar?
- All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them
- Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.
- We think that Paradise and Calvary,
- Christ’s cross and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;
- Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
- As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
- May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
- So, in His purple wrapp’d, receive me, Lord;
- By these His thorns, give me His other crown;
- And as to others’ souls I preach’d Thy word,
- Be this my text, my sermon to mine own,
- “Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down.”
Source: Luminarium.org.