Addressing the reader in second person, the Signs of Death poet enumerates the signs and expects them to be felt viscerally by the listener. The chilling process begins with one’s changing hue and ends with loss of breath. The narrator then takes the listener past the point of death to envisioning and feeling the sensations of being laid out and shrouded, and then being buried in a pit amid worms. The final line consigns the dead one to oblivion. The affective method of the poem may be compared to An Orison to Our Lord (art. 25).

This poem belongs with several aphoristic, mnemonic poems in Jesus 29, particularly Ten Abuses (art. 15) and its companion in the manuscript Three Sorrowful Tidings (art. 23), along with Will and Wit (art. 9), contributed by the Cotton MS. The Signs of Death is a familiar trope of Middle English lyrics, commonly found in death lyrics and debates of the body and the soul. For other imaginings of how Death enters the body, see Death’s Wither-Clench and Death (arts. 7, 14). On the Signs of Death tradition, see Brown, pp. 130, 220–22; Woolf, pp. 81–83; and Louis, MWME, 9:3042–44 [374–86].

[Fol. 189r. NIMEV 4047 (see also 3998, 4033). DIMEV 6462 (see also 6383, 6437, 6439, 6447, 6459, 6460). Louis, MWME, 9:3042, 3400 [377]. Quire: 4. Meter: 12 lines, rhyming in couplets, aa3–4. The last line is hypermetric. Layout: The ends of lines are punctuated. Several lines are continuously written as prose. Editions from MS Jesus 29: Morris, p. 101; Brown, pp. 220–21. One other MS: Oxford, BodL, MS Bodley 416, fol. 109r (Brown, p. 221).]