“THIS IS MY PLAY’S LAST SCENE”
(HOLY SONNET 6)
The present holy Sonnet by John Donne is a prayer of the sinner who finds his end very near and who would like to be free from his sense of sin and guilt. The sinner here has realised that he has lived his life the way he should not have lived.
The Sonnet opens with the shakespearean shadow of the life as a drama and every human being as an actor or actress. The sinner tells that he has already approached the last scene of his play “Life” and the last milestone of the pilgrimage of his life is about to come. That milestone is nothing but death. He admits that the race of his life has been run idly and very speedily by him. Now he has limited time and space between him and his death. He knows the nature of death which never spares anyone. That is the reason why he calls death gluttonous. This gluttonous death would separate the soul from his body within a moment. When that happens his plywood end. The sinner also admits that the very thought of death causes tremor in him but that is bound to happen. Ones his devoured by gluttonous death, his soul will go back to its original place heaven and soulless body (a body without soul) will also go back to his original place the soil. Here we notice a meeting point between the Indian philosophy about death and the western philosophy. The Indian thought about death states that body is made of 5 earthly elements and finally it mingled with the same earthly elements. The sinners knows this truth and so he requests all his sins to part with him to fall down so that he can leave his world peacefully. The sinnar of this poem would like to be free from guilt. He wants to be purged before his death so that the drama of his life may end quietly. The sinner wants that the final curtain of his life as a drama should fall peacefully. He would like to say goodbye to his life, to his body and to the devil sin so that he can save himself. If you fails to do this there is nothing except hell for him.
The present holy Sonnet has two remarkable metaphysical conceits in it. The adjective which Donne uses for death “gluttonous” is a metaphysical image. It is a word from material field of life used for death. The second conceit is or ‘Unjoynt'(Unjoint) which originally belongs to the discipline of engineering. That is the field in which mechanical parts are joined and unjoined. Here this image is used for the separation of soul and body.It justify Donne as a metaphysical poet who can use such images even for a serious object just like death.