Home › Glossary › Letter B

bona mors

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A good death; the ideal of dying peacefully, virtuously, and with dignity.

Detailed Definition
Bona mors is the counterpart to a bad or shameful death and connects to the ars moriendi tradition. In poetry, it appears in elegies and meditations on mortality where the manner of dying is seen to reflect the quality of the life lived. Poets explore what constitutes a good death: dying in one's sleep, dying in battle, dying surrounded by loved ones, or dying in the fullness of one's creative powers. The phrase carries a moral and aesthetic dimension, making death itself a subject of evaluation.
Example
Example in poetry:
The Roman ideal of bona mors — dying in battle, dying at one's post, dying with one's dignity intact — pervades Latin epic poetry from Ennius to Virgil; Sir Walter Raleigh's poem written on the night before his execution is a sustained reflection on bona mors — the attempt to achieve a good death through the act of writing; Keats's letters meditate obsessively on bona mors — the ideal of dying in beauty and fullness rather than in the gradual extinction of tuberculosis; A poet sitting with a dying friend or parent might write a bona mors poem — attempting to identify and celebrate the qualities that make this death a good one; Philip Larkin's "Aubade" is explicitly anti-bona mors — stripping away every consolation the tradition offers and insisting that there is no such thing as a death that does not simply mean the end of everything
Additional Notes
Bona mors connects to a rich network of classical and Christian concepts around death. In the classical tradition, a good death meant dying in battle (for soldiers), dying in the fullness of one's powers and reputation (for poets and philosophers), or dying with Stoic equanimity. In the Christian tradition, bona mors required dying in a state of grace, with the sacraments administered and the soul reconciled to God. Students should note that the two traditions are not always compatible: the warrior's good death — dying in glorious combat — may be very different from the Christian good death of peaceful surrender and forgiveness. The tension between these models gives many death poems their complexity. Related terms include ars moriendi, mors voluntaria (voluntary death), obitus (departure, a gentle term for death), and the related concept of the kalos thanatos (beautiful death) in the Greek tradition.
Also Known As
a good death dying well the good death kalos thanatos
Skip to main content