A Comparative Study of Death in John Donne and Sohrab Sepehri

John Donne, the greatest metaphysical poet, was one of the poets whose interest in death is known worldwide. A contemporary Iranian poet, Sohrab Sepehri employs the subject in some of his poems. The similarity in subject is the starting point of the present paper which aims at discovering the points of difference. While Donne was a death poet due to the frequency of the subject in his works, Sepehri employed death as much as other fundamental questions of man. While Donne was inconsistent toward death, Sepehri treated death with a constant positive manner. Donne’s inconsistency was a result of his religious uncertainty and Sepehri’s constant positive manner was a result of his familiarity with Islamic and eastern mysticism.