Hi, I'm Andrew Kern, and I have the great privilege of sitting in for David Kern on this episode of the Daily Poem.

And I'm going to read to you Holy Sonnet 10 from John Dunn, which you may have heard before.

I'm just going to mention briefly before I start that this is a sonnet, 14 lines,

and that it is a response at least in part to Hamlet,

because everything is.

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, chants, kings, and desperate men, and dust with poison, war, and sickness dwell.

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well and better than thy stroke.

Why swells thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die.

In Don's, John Dunn's typical pattern, shall we say, this is a deeply ironic, paradoxical poem,

and yet at the same time it's one of his clearest poems on the surface.

He seems to be playing the least with convoluted, what they called conceits, metaphorical conceits, in fact.

A conceit is an imaginative structure.

We now think of conceit as pride, but in that day, conceit meant imagination, basically. And when you

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