Tyler van Opstal- Some brief notes on Donne’s Meditation 17

    John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) is known almost exclusively for the passage containing “No man is an island, entire of itself... (pg. 100)” in the chapter “Meditation 17,” a prose passage that is often reformatted and reprinted as a poem. I have included the entirety of it, in poem form, below for the sake of anyone who has never read it: 

No man is an island, 

Entire of itself; 

Every man is a piece of the continent, 

A part of the main. 

If a clod be washed away by the sea, 

Europe is the less, 

As well as if a promontory were: 

As well as if a manor of thy friend's 

Or of thine own were. 

Any man's death diminishes me, 

Because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee. 

 

    There is abundant analysis available of these lines, but I will stain the blog by adding low-quality analysis of my own. The first six lines of the poem/passage relate humanity to a continent made of the dirt clods of individual humans, allowing the reader to visualize that humanity (a continent) is worth more than the sum of its humans (a big pile of dirt), and because of this a subtraction from the sum costs the whole more than just the value of one unit. Donne encourages the reader to imagine that they, by their inclusion in the continent of humanity, should take pride in the sum of the whole and identify themselves with that entire continent. Because of that pride, Donne demands that his readers feel anything that chips away at the continent as something that chips away from their own pride and being. Though he uses Europe as his analogy, Donne does not mean for the reader to only feel kinship with their countrymen and instead uses the final lines to emphasis that the continent of humanity is made of any man and that we should not ask whether someone who is killed is their friend, their countryman, or even their enemy- no matter the identity of the deceased, it is the death of part of the reader as a human. 

    To move away from the most famous part of “Meditations 17” now, I would like to bring attention to the phrase included by Donne at the top of the chapter: NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS. The translators of my copy translate this as “Now, this Bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die (pg. 99).” This is a much harsher statement than what he includes in the famous passage- instead of the bell (another’s death) being placed as analogous to yourself dying, the death of another is now an order that YOU must die because if one part of the whole has been given up then there is no alternative but for that part to be ripped from you as well.  Later in the chapter, but before the famous passage, Donne proposes a set of rhetorical questions including “Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?” to illustrate that not only are all bound in that contract, but that it is a contract from which no one can remove themself.  

Quotes from  

Donne, John. Devotions. William Pickering, London (1840). 

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