The opening of Death is indicated not by an incipit, but by an exhortation to “listen” — a common trope for opening — which comes immediately after Doomsday’s closing invocation to pray. As explained in the headnote for art. 13, Doomsday and this poem are presented in all manuscripts as a joined pair. Both have the same meter, are related in content and monitory style, and were surely composed by the same writer. In Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86, the scribe appends The Debate between the Body and the Soul to both Doomsday and Death, with which both poems have overlapping content.

Calling it by its alternate title, The Latemest Day, Pearsall characterizes Death as a poem of “grim strength and imaginative limitation” (Old and Middle English Poetry, p. 96). At a length of thirty-three stanzas, it is three times longer than Doomsday. It continues the same subject by addressing the need of the living to avoid distractions from the Devil and the World, and to contemplate the reality of death and the soul’s final fate. Addressing the reader who sits comfortably in rich clothes, the moralist reminds him how he had nothing when born and will have nothing when he departs. When Death enters us (line 27), we will become a mere corpse, a “cley-clot” (clay-clod; line 37). Our friends will take our possessions, and our lonely soul will lament. Then the soul will utter recriminations against the foolish body, with arguments that align with the body/soul debate tradition. Details of the grave — of worms gruesomely supplanting one’s former comfort in clothes — become part of the reformative rhetorical strategy, which is soon succeeded by a graphic description of hell-fire and the Fiend, who sports hideous horns on his knees (line 114). The poem concludes with an exhortation to avoid lechery (“hordom”; line 125), have masses sung, and perform charitable acts, and then closes with a conventional prayer to achieve heaven.

Death possesses an intriguing structural likeness to Doomsday, which can be taken as another mark of shared authorship. Both show signs of an author wanting to push the subjects’ grim limits toward escape routes. While Doomsday situates the sight of Mary in the central stanza, and then closes in prayer to her as intercessor, Death sets the singing of masses and the giving of alms in the central stanza (lines 65–66), and then closes with those same ideas about how to achieve pardon. Both poems gain a kind of rhetorical elegance and power of persuasion by strategically setting such hopeful signs amid the desperate horror of the signs of doom and death.

As with Doomsday, the Cotton version of Death agrees with the Jesus version in the number and order of stanzas. And, again as with Doomsday, Morris prints Death in 8-line stanzas despite the absence of internal rhymes. The Cambridge, TCC, MS B.14.39, and Digby 86 versions of Death are shorter poems, mainly because they both omit the first four stanzas and begin at line 17, which in Digby reads: “Þench of þe latemeste dai, hou we shulen fare” (Stengel, ed., Codicem manu scriptum Digby 86, p. 98, stanza 41). The Digby version thus has twenty-nine stanzas, which agree with Cotton/Jesus stanzas 5–33. The version in TCC is quite different, though, because the stanzas are substantially rearranged and three unique stanzas have been added. Using the Cotton/Jesus stanza-sequence of Death as the base-text, the twenty-nine stanzas in the TCC version are ordered as follows: 5, 6, 11, 7, 9, 10, 19, 20, 22, 21, 13, 23, 14, (new), 17, 15, 16, 18, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, (new), (new), 32, 33. The nine stanzas missing from the TCC version are 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 24, 25, 26. All four versions end with the same stanza of prayer for protection from the Devil.

The three other versions of Death may be viewed by digital facsimile. For TCC, MS B.14.39, see https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/Manuscript/B.14.39-40(Opens in a new tab or window); for MS Digby 86, see https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4426(Opens in a new tab or window); and for MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, see http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Caligula_A_IX(Opens in a new tab or window).

[Fols. 182v–184v. NIMEV 3517. DIMEV 5640. Utley, MWME, 3:694, 850 [18(h)]. Quire: 4. Meter: 132 septenary lines in thirty-three 4-line stanzas, rhyming aaaa7. Layout: Long lines with medial and end punctuation. A colored capital marks the beginning of each 4-line stanza. The poem begins without a break after Doomsday. Editions from MS Jesus 29: Morris, pp. 169–85; Reichl, pp. 415–36. Three other MSS: Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86, fols. 198r–200r (Stengel, ed., Codicem manu scriptum Digby 86, pp. 98–101; Reichl, pp. 415–36); Cambridge, TCC, MS B.14.39, fols. 43v–45v (Brown, pp. 46–49, 188–91; Reichl, pp. 415–36); London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fol. 247r (Wright, pp. 70–80; Morris, pp. 168–84; Brown, pp. 50–54, 188–91; Reichl, pp. 415–36).]