The death of Death

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die

Taken from the 1926 story The Call of Cthulhu, and purporting to be a couplet from the mystical-but-fictional Necronomicon, these are arguably H. P. Lovecraft's two most famous lines. Much has been written about them - from literary analysis to full-blown esoterica - but their meaning as such is not what I want to look at here; rather their parallels with extracts from other well-known writers, some of whom may well have inspired Lovecraft's style.

The metaphysical aspect of some of his work means that similarities have more than once been noted with the likes of John Donne whose lines include (at the end of the 6th and final Divine Meditations sonnet, written around 1609):

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,

And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

That Lovecraft echoes Donne is clear - not only in the wording and style, but also the theme of eternity and the paradox of Death dying. Of course, looking further back into history, Dante's most famous lines, from Canto III of Inferno, provide another link in this chain of style and ideas:

Before me there were no created things,

Only eterne, and I eternal last.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!

Again we see a weightiness - Lovecraft's eldritch imaginings lurking out in the cosmos; Donne's utter confidence in the face of Death; the words on Dante's gate seeking to imbue the impending descent with utter hopelessness. However, more recent writers have taken such ideas and made them more immediate. On such is the war poet Wilfred Owen who, in 1918, wrote the following as part of To My Friend (With an Identity Disc):

If ever I had dreamed of my dead name

High in the heart of London, unsurpassed

By time for ever, and the Fugitive, Fame,

There seeking a long sanctuary at last...

The 'dead name' and the evocation of eternity recall Lovecraft, though the ephemeral nature of fame, and dreams thereof, are rather different - after all, Lovecraft's human protagonists rarely survive their encounters with the forces of beyond except in the diaries and notes they leave behind for others to decipher, and maybe use in undertaking similar follies. Fame is not theirs. Still, for me, the parallels remain although there is, as far as I am aware (I may be wrong), no evidence that Lovecraft had read Owen at this stage - the former was exceptionally insular while the latter (who died in 1918, killed in action a week before the end of the First World War) did not have a collection published until 1920.

H. P. Lovecraft's gravestone