"Death, be not proud"

"Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but they pictures be,

Much pleasure - then, from thee much more must flow" (4-6).

John Donne's "Death, be not proud" was a very nice poem for a variety of reasons, some of which are not nice.  For one, the title of them poem immediately told me that the poem was an apostrophe towards death - or atleast I hope so, since this is the first time that I have noticed a work being an apostrophe.  Also, since this poem is fourteen lines, my English teacher taught me that it is probably going to be a sonnet with a call to action in the last six lines.

The title conveys the message that the speaker will be telling us all the reasons that death is not as mighty as it thinks it is.  I smell personification and lemon cleaner, the latter being more prevalent.  The above lines did not make sense to me until I started typing that last sentence, but now I actually find the excerpt quite humorous.  Let me just paraphrase them for you:

"Dear death, you cannot kill me, because

I, like everyone, enjoy naps

and death is just a long nap."

This, my dear friend, is flawless logic if I have ever heard any.  The speaker does not fear death per se, but the speaker is definitely trying to rap his mind around the idea that death is not something that should be considered so... deadly?  Let me explain (I am getting graded on that part after all).  If the speaker fears death - which is predestined by fate or just blind chance (a.k.a. inevitable) - then what happens after you die?  See, this is where the call to action happens!  The speaker actually gives me the answers in a barrage of paradoxes - thanks for making it more difficult on me.  Since death is just a nap, and everyone wakes up from a nap, after death there will be nothing for the speaker to fear then.

P.S.  Did John Donne just pass Emily Dickinson in the latest label war?

"To Autumn (Murphy?)"

"Where are the songs of spring?  Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too..."

This is the only type of personified
pumpkin that I enjoy to see in my life.

This poem by John Keats completely baffles me.  It is divided into three stanzas which seem to go chronologically by time of day and the time of Autumn.  The first stanza seems to represent the longing for summer as Autumn quickly sneaked in, while also representing early morning.  This is kind of contradicted though since it talked so much about the harvest, which is more in the middle of Autumn if I remember correctly, but I suppose most crops are harvested at different times of the season.  The next stanza proceeds on to what I would consider a more stereotypical Autumn with an old time store selling cider to people passing by the store.  It feels midday in the setting descriptions given by Keats.  This stanza also had the strongest imagery when it described the multitude of aspects of the store.  One of the questions asked what was being personified, but I cannot figure out what this image is.  I think that it might be either apples or a pumpkin, but I have narrowed it down to where it is probably something mentioned in the first stanza.  Gourds are the last items in that stanza, so I will deduce that the gourds are being personified?  The last stanza I believe is supposed to show the speaker's anxiety towards spring and life beginning to flourish, but that is probably not correct since they still have to endure winter as well.  This stanza also seemed to continue our chronological pattern by being more set in the evening (You know, that awkward time when it is not dark enough to start a bonfire, but too dark to play cards on merely daylight.  After I typed that all out, I realized that most people call that dusk.)