Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Dryden dismantles the melodrama around dying by aiming his blade at the real culprit: uncertainty. "Death in itself is nothing" is a daring premise from a 17th-century poet steeped in Christian cosmology and civil turmoil. After plague years, political executions, and the whiplash of Restoration England, death wasn’t abstract; it was a public fact. What Dryden calls "nothing" isn’t denial, it’s a rhetorical move that strips death of its theatrical power so he can name the deeper terror that survives even the most devout theology.

The engine of the line is its stammering repetition: "we know not what, we know not where". That doubling mimics panic: the mind circling an empty center, unable to land on an image sturdy enough to fear properly. Dryden’s subtext is almost clinical. Pain, burial, the end of breath - these are legible. What breaks us is the transition: the possibility of a self forced into a new state without coordinates, a consciousness deprived of familiar categories. He’s less interested in the corpse than the dislocation of identity.

There’s also a quiet indictment of certainty merchants: churches, philosophers, and poets themselves who sell mapped afterlives. Dryden doesn’t scoff at belief, but he admits the gap it cannot fully seal. The line works because it captures a modern feeling in antique dress: the dread isn’t extinction, it’s being relocated into the unimaginable.