Selections from John Donne’s Death’s Duel, a Consolation Against
the Dying Life and Living Death of the Body. Converted to Modern
English, Edited, and Introduced by theMB In the year of Our Lord
1631, John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, left his sickbed and stood
before the King’s Majesty in his chapel at the Palace of
Whitehall, there to deliver a Lenten sermon. He spoke for an
hour or so, taking as his text, Psalm 68, verse 20: He is our
God, the God of our salvation; God is the Lord, by whom we
escape death. He said something like this on that occasion. The
old expositors looked at the final part of the verse (God is the
Lord, by whom we escape death) in three ways: First, it is in
God’s power and it is often his will to give us frequent escapes
and deliverances, even when we find ourselves almost in the jaws
and teeth of death, and on the lips of that whirlpool, the
grave. In this way of reading, the verse refers to those
frequent, but temporary, evasions or deliverances from death
which we all experience fro